Pubdate: Wed, 25 May 2016
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Page: A13
Copyright: 2016 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Reid Rusonik
Note: Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer and managing 
partner of Rusonik, O'Connor, Robbins, Ross, Gorham & Angelini, LLP.

WANT TO ADDRESS GUN CRIME? TACKLE ROOT CAUSES

Robbing and killing your competitors is a completely acceptable and 
expected form of doing business within the drug trade

The recent shooting death of a pregnant woman has brought widespread 
attention to the increase in the number of gun-related deaths in 
Toronto over this time last year. It has also brought about a 
citywide reflection upon what can be done, including calls for larger 
police budgets and more "proactive" policing - a thinly veiled appeal 
for a return to robust "carding" by the police.

Deferring to these calls and returning to a practice that denies tens 
of thousands of people of colour in this city their most basic rights 
and freedoms, while dramatically cheapening the integrity of everyone 
else's, would not only be constitutionally illegal and immoral, it 
would also ignore the root causes of gun violence.

Criminal defence lawyers have the unique opportunity to actually 
speak in the context of the trust-based solicitor/ client 
relationship to the people who have armed themselves with guns. We 
quickly learn through such discussions that the problem is not as 
complex as some like our mayor and police chief would have us 
believe. It's actually quite simply understood and the two required 
solutions equally obvious.

The people who carry guns do so, almost invariably, as part of the 
illegal drug trade.

Like almost any other business, the drug trade is competitive. Unlike 
almost any other business, the illegal drug trade is completely 
unregulated by law. Robbing and killing your competitors is a 
completely acceptable and expected form of doing business within the 
trade. The only consequences for these acts other than the unlikely 
event of the police catching you is being robbed or killed in 
retaliation by your victims or their business "associates" - and you 
are usually too young and cocky to believe what you did to them can 
also happen to you.

The other thing criminal defence lawyers learn very quickly is that 
the vast majority of the participants in the illegal drug trade at 
its most violent street level come from desperately impoverished backgrounds.

These, then, are the two causes of gun violence: illegal drugs and 
poverty. It really is this simple: poor people sell illegal drugs and 
rob and kill each other as result of competition over a limited 
market of illegal drug consumers.

Illegal drugs are profitable to sell precisely because they are 
illegal. The vast majority of the price the seller commands is the 
cost of the risk taken to bring the product to the consumer.

Coca and opium, for example, are truly dirt-cheap to produce. When 
you buy cocaine or heroin the high price you pay isn't because of the 
cost of producing the substance. Legalize them and you eliminate this 
risk. The government could take over their sale in the same way it 
sells other drugs like alcohol and use the proceeds to fund abuse and 
addiction treatment.

Drug abuse and addiction brings us to another side of poverty as a 
cause of gun violence: many poor people consume illegal drugs to 
escape the despair of being poor and become an essential part of the 
market for the drug trade.

What is required to eliminate these causes of gun violence is as 
clear as they are simply understood: we need to legalize drugs and 
ensure people have the sufficient funds and the incentive to escape poverty.

This, then, is the choice before us: react out of fear and heed the 
call of the police union, for example, and watch the police force get 
richer and more powerful while the rest of society grows poorer and 
weaker, less free and even less safe, or behave courageously and 
compassionately and address the root causes of the problem.

A pregnant woman is dead because we have already chosen 
criminalization and oppression of rights and freedoms to control our 
problems rather than solving them. There is hope. The federal 
government has promised to legalize marijuana and this may reveal the 
good sense of legalizing all illegal drugs.

Even more hopeful, the Ontario government has announced a plan to 
experiment with replacing welfare with a guaranteed annual income 
program which would raise the incomes of the impoverished above the 
poverty line and provide them with an incentive to earn even more so 
that they could escape the need for assistance altogether.

Until we pursue these kinds of courageous and compassionate solutions 
with even more vigour, however, the gun death tragedies will continue 
- - no matter how big our police forces or "proactive" their approaches.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom