Go Ahead...Bring in the Army

The Liberals have had a rough couple of days suffering almost universal lambasting for an attack ad (guns....in our cities...in Canada) that seemingly almost ran on national TV. The wisdom - or lack thereof - of the attack aside, there is a shred of value in the ad as it relates to Toronto's rising gun violence: Why not bring in the army?

That's right. Bring the Army to Toronto. Arm them with big guns loaded with rubber bullets, and deploy them at strategic checkpoints in high gun-crime areas.

What? But we're in Toronto, not Kabul. It reeks of racial profiling. It's reactionary tactic, and it will only mean gun criminals move their turf.

Well...maybe. But here are a few reasons why it isn't such a crazy idea:

It's our bloodiest war - With the utmost respect to our fallen soldiers, more Canadians have died from gunshots in Toronto in the last year than in all foreign conflicts combined. According to reports from CBC and the DND, in the past two years eight Canadians have been killed in Afghanistan, one (serving with the U.S. forces) was killed in Iraq, and one submariner perished in the HMCS Chicoutimi fire. By contrast, Toronto saw gun-related homicides more than double to an astounding 52 deaths in 2005.

It might work now - I couldn't be more supportive of root-cause solutions to Toronto's gun problems, but they won't help curb the problem today; they'll either come into effect after subsequent rounds of gun deaths (in the case of raising minimum sentences) or in a generation (in the case of community programs). This solution could put a quick end to the problem in days.

It's their mandate - One of the duties of the Army is "providing armed and unarmed assistance to civil authorities when needed to maintain public order and security or to assist in emergency relief." And - jokes from Albertan aside - if snow removal constitutes emergency relief as Mel Lastman believed, surely putting an end to an explosion in gun violence does too.

It's not racial profiling - It's regional profiling, with soldiers deployed only to strategic locations in high crime areas. As someone who lives in one affected area, I can say without question that I'd rather wake up to checkpoints manned by the Canadian Forces than I would to find a dead man, shot in the head in an apparent drug deal gone wrong, in the playground of the school where my two-year old son may end up going in a few short years.