Guns

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, some experts are warning of a parallel epidemic in Canada and the United States: a rash of gun violence.

In Toronto, the number of shootings this year was 409, up from 380 over the same period in 2019. Over the summer, youth advocates warned that the closure of safe spaces such as community centres was partly behind the disturbing trend.

The problem appears even more acute in the U.S., which has one of the highest rates of death from gun violence in the developed world and has similarly seen spikes in gun violence during the pandemic. In the spring, firearm deaths were up while Americans sheltered at home, according to NBC, and gun sales also increased.

Chethan Sathya, a University of Toronto alumnus, surgeon and director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health in New York state, is working with colleagues to create a universal screening tool that would identify those at risk of firearms injury. The large-scale study received more than US$1.3 million in funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The goal, Sathya says, is to make medical screening for firearm injury as routine as questions about smoking or sugar intake, and to provide patients with counselling around guns.

“If we make it part of usual care, it will really push us to consider this a public health issue and to normalize the conversation around guns,” he says.

Sathya recently spoke to U of T News about the screening initiative.

How did you become interested in gun violence as a research area?

When I was in Toronto doing my residency in surgery, we did start to notice toward the latter end of that training that we were seeing more and more gunshots. So you know this is very much an issue in Canada as well as in the U.S., especially in Toronto which has had an uptick in gun violence.

I came to Chicago for my paediatric surgery training and I was pretty horrified to have to continually treat children and babies with bullet wounds, pulling bullets out of six-month-old babies. It was horrific to see. That was a wake-up call for me to get involved in this issue as a public health issue.

Telling family after family that their kid had died from a gunshot wound became very horrendous. When I got to New York, that got me very involved in the American College (of Surgeons) and multiple national societies including Doctors for Protection from Guns that's led by Dr. Najma Ahmed [of U of T's Temerty Faculty of Medicine].

Our CEO at Northwell was one of the first health-care CEOs to take a stance on gun violence. It really reverberated. That led to the establishment for the Center For Gun Violence Prevention. Our goal at the center is to mobilize the health-care sector as a whole.

Your screening approach to gun violence is modelled after an earlier initiative at Northwell to address substance abuse. Why do you think a similar approach would work here?

The program for substance use really prides itself on asking everybody about substance use. The whole idea is that if you ask everyone, you avoid stigmatization. You make the conversation very normal and just part of the usual care that everybody gets as part of their hospital visit.

You could imagine asking targeted folks about substance use. It might come off as judgmental and it also makes physicians reluctant to do so. But if you make it part of the workflow, part of the routine visit, it's a pretty big movement.

Basically. this has never been done with respect to firearms in Canada, the U.S. or anywhere in the world. This is why we approached the NIH with this project and this is the thing they were most excited about: We are going to implement a universal, we-ask-everyone approach to firearm safety. We're going to ask every patient who comes into the emergency department questions around firearm access and gun violence risk.

We have a score that has been validated that will be integrated into the electronic health record. And so every patient will be asked, and our hope is that it will yield a ton of data that we've never had because of the Dickey Amendment [the 1996 rule passed by Congress that was interpreted as barring gun violence research].

It'll provide a wealth of data, but it will also normalize the conversation between physicians and patients about guns because in Canada and the U.S. very few physicians actually ask.

Why are doctors often reluctant to talk to their patients about guns?

There are multitude of factors – this has kind of been studied.

We are going to find out the real reasons because of this large-scale study, but thus far what we know is the barriers include not wanting to offend patients.

They also don't know how to have the conversation. It's not a normal conversation to have. They don't know how to counsel around gun safety and so if your patient says, ‘OK. I have a firearm,’ then what?

How do you counsel and what are the resources you can provide these patients, whether it be in the community or gun locks and that kind of thing? Most physicians have no idea.

Tell me more about the screening process. What kind of questions will you be asking?

We're going to be asking questions around firearm access inside and outside the household, and we're going to be asking questions about gun violence risk.

There's a population of folks who have guns in the household and then there's youths and so on from disadvantaged communities that are at increased gun violence risk. But there is a score called the safety score that has some questions that have been validated and can give you a sense of how at-risk a person is. Those include questions like: Have you recently had a gun pulled on you? Have you been in fights? That type of thing. It's more about situational violence.

When do you plan to start?

Hopefully in the next couple of months. We're already in the process of integrating it into our electronic health records. As you can imagine, there's a lot to work out because this is a big health system.

What kind of insights do you hope this initiative will provide?

Because this has never been done before, I think the potential impact is tremendous.

We know so little about why physicians don't ask and how patients really feel about this. From the studies, we know most patients are actually OK with doctors asking, but still we don't have enough of a broad study to tell that.

This will elucidate what the barriers and facilitators are on both the patient and provider side about asking these questions, and then a big part of this is not just the screening, it's the intervention. We're going to be counselling them, giving gun locks to all the patients that need them and providing those at gun violence risk with community resources.

We're partnering with community organizations for that. I think there's so much to be learned at every step of the way. We also want to learn: Is the counselling we do effective?

We're going to follow these patients in the community and see if they change their [gun] storage behaviour. Did they have repeat violent events? We're actually going to be assessing if this made a difference.

Then there's the overall paradigm shift that we hope to create by making gun violence questions part of usual care. We want to address this so that it’s no different than with smoking or sugar intake. If we make it part of the usual care, it will really push us to consider this as a public health issue and to normalize the conversation around guns. That's the biggest asset that could come from this.

Last year, Congress set aside US$25 million for firearm safety studies. That doesn't sound much for something that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates is responsible for almost 40,000 deaths a year.

Exactly. I completely agree. We all welcome, for the first time, federal funding because it really gives us a sense of purpose when we're doing this research. This is what's going to allow us to do such a large-scale research project. At the same time, however, it's a drop in the pond compared to what's given to cancer research, heart disease, smoking, all that stuff. So, I think there's a lot more work to do. We're hopeful this will continue, and it looks like it will. The amount of support will increase, I think, depending on which administration takes over. But we're hopeful that this is the start of more to come.

Investment in at-risk communities needed to reduce gun violence, U of T's Jooyoung Lee tells TVO's The Agenda

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 19:06:57 +0000

Investment in at-risk communities needed to reduce gun violence, U of T's Jooyoung Lee tells TVO's The Agenda

geoff.vendeville Wed, 08/14/2019 - 15:06

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Toronto police and the forensics team examine shells and blood stains after a shooting in July near Queen Street West and Ossington Avenue (Rene Johnston/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Topic

Our Community

Cities

Faculty of Arts & Science

Guns

Sociology

Following an unusual spate of gun violence, University of Toronto sociologist Jooyoung Lee spoke to TVO's The Agenda about the need for investment in at-risk communities to reduce gun crimes.

Lee’s appearance on the program come after 14 separate gun-related incidents in the Greater Toronto Area over the August long weekend. The municipal, provincial and federal governments have responded by announcing $4.5 million in additional funding for Toronto police to tackle gun violence.

The recent spike in gun violence was not a “one-off,” Lee said on The Agenda, pointing to police statistics that show the number of shooting-related injuries in Toronto more than doubling between 2014 and this year.

Lee, who appeared on the show along with community activist Louis March, called for a greater emphasis on prevention through community investment.

“Why not create a society where the most at risk are not likely to get involved in situations, where they could become a victim or an offender?” Lee said. “Why not create a society full of safety nets that deflects and funnels at-risk youth into other activities that could help them avoid these situations?”

'You could avoid huge numbers of deaths': U of T researcher on gun fatalities in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 22 May 2019 16:38:38 +0000

'You could avoid huge numbers of deaths': U of T researcher on gun fatalities in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/22/2019 - 12:38

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Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist with the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and his fellow researchers analyzed more than 106 million deaths among men 15 to 34 (photo courtesy of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health)

Heidi Singer

Topic

Global Lens

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Medicine

Global

Guns

Research & Innovation

surgery

Professor Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, has published a comprehensive study that found race and education strongly correlates with a young man’s chances of dying from guns in the United States, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.

Working with Anna Dare, a surgical resident at U of T and St. Michael’s Hospital, Jha and his fellow researchers analyzed more than 106 million deaths among men aged 15 to 34 in the four countries, looking at how firearms-related mortality corresponded with race and education.

He said he expected to find a correlation with lower education and non-white races, but was still shocked at the strength of the connection the researchers uncovered – particularly in America.

“In the U.S., the differences are really driven by race,” said Jha, who is also the director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital and a world leader in collecting and analyzing data about why people die.

U of T’s Heidi Singer caught up with Jha to ask him more about the study and its findings.

What surprised you most about these results?

The most surprising result was how big the ratio in equalities were between young Black men in the U.S. and other groups, including young Black men in these other countries. I was surprised by the extent to which the risk was so much higher in the U.S.

In the U.S., the differences are really driven by race, so a young Black man with a post-secondary education has 30 times [more] risk of being killed by firearms than his white counterpart. He’s even 14 times more likely to be shot and killed than an uneducated white man. We didn’t see anything like this in other countries we studied.

I was also surprised by how much gun deaths varied within a country by time and space, with factors such as drug wars. But we also saw that in Mexico and Colombia they were able to reduce mortality through firearms restrictions and broader social policies. It suggests that if the U.S. and Brazil were able to do the same, you could avoid huge numbers of deaths.

That said, generally firearms mortality has improved over time – the risk was much higher in the past.

Do you think these results could bolster gun control advocacy in the U.S.?

I’ve never taken the approach of trying to influence a political agenda. The only thing I do is rub the noses of politicians in the data. And the data here really jump out in saying that reducing young Black men’s deaths requires a reduction in firearms.

Was this really the first time anyone thought to correlate gun deaths with education and race in some of these countries?

Differences in education have been documented before. But differences in race and education and how much they contributed to the life expectancy has not been studied. Young men are generally healthy – we shouldn’t have many deaths at that age group. But when they do die, up to half of it is attributed to guns.

What prompted this study?

Counting the dead is an extremely powerful way to improve public health. These are routine data but we just looked at them carefully.

U of T researchers find firearm mortality in the Americas highest among young men, links to education and race

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 22 May 2019 14:23:50 +0000

U of T researchers find firearm mortality in the Americas highest among young men, links to education and race

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/22/2019 - 10:23

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Students gather at a gun control rally in Washington, D.C. on March 14, 2019 (photo by Alex Wong via Getty Images)

Heidi Singer

Topic

Breaking Research

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Medicine

Global

Guns

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

surgery

University of Toronto researchers have analyzed more than 106 million deaths and found that firearms are a leading cause of mortality in men aged 15 to 34 years in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and the United States.

While the number of firearm deaths has previously been reported at the national level for countries in the Americas, the variations in firearm mortality at the state level, by race or ethnicity, and by education level have not been examined before. In addition, the impact of these deaths on life expectancy among subpopulations hadn’t been assessed.

The authors say that the variation in risk of firearm deaths in different populations and the changing patterns they have observed provide strong evidence that as many as 1.8 million dealths could have been avoided between 1990 and 2016 across all ages and genders, including one million in men aged 15 to 34.

The study, published this week in the journal The Lancet Public Health, also highlights the important role of education level and race in firearm deaths.

“Firearms are not only a leading and persistent cause of mortality in the USA, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil – and as such must be considered a major public health concern – but the extreme variations in firearm mortality among sub-populations represent a societal challenge,” says study co-author Prabhat Jha, a professor at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital.

“Changes in firearm mortality explain most of the variation in overall mortality among young men in these four countries over the past 25 years – and in the U.S. firearm homicides account for three quarters of the marked differences in overall mortality observed between young white and Black men, regardless of educational level.”

Read a Q&A with U of T researcher Prabhat Jha on the study in The Lancet Public Health

Firearms have remained a persistent cause of premature death in the Americas for the past 25 years. While firearm mortality in the U.S. is markedly higher than in any other high-income country, the rates in several Central and South American countries are even higher.

In the study, the authors collected national data on individual deaths between 1990 and 2015 in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, which all have high-quality data on cause of death and high firearm mortality. Using information from death certificates, they compared overall and firearm mortality at the country and state levels. In addition, the authors analyzed these deaths by intent (homicide, suicide, unintentional or undetermined), and they also stratified cause of death data by age, gender and education level.

For homicide, the authors analyzed data by education in all four countries and by race in the U.S. and Brazil.

Brazil had the highest number of firearm deaths in all ages and genders between 1990 and 2015 (855,000 deaths), followed by the U.S. (851,000), Colombia (494,000), and Mexico (272,000). Homicide was the most common form of firearm death in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (accounting for 90 per cent, 94 per cent, and 83 per cent of cases, respectively), while suicide accounted for 56 per cent of all U.S. firearms deaths.

During the study period, the risk to young men of dying from firearms increased in Mexico and Brazil, but decreased in the U.S. and Colombia, according to the researchers.

Firearm mortality accounted for up to half of the overall risk of premature death for young men, ranging from 12.5 per cent of overall mortality risk in Mexico to 58 per cent in Colombia in 2000 to 2004. The authors found that where firearm mortality has fallen, the reductions account for much of the improved life expectancy in young men.

Place of residence, education and race were important risk factors in death from firearms. The researchers found more than a 10-fold variation in the risk of firearm mortality, ranging from 1.1 per cent in Louisiana to 0.1 per cent in Hawaii. In Mexico, the regional variation ranged from 4.7 per cent in Chihuahua to 0.05 per cent in Yucatán. Typically, deaths were concentrated in a few high-burden states, but these varied over time, particularly in Brazil and Colombia – highlighting the volatility of firearm violence and mortality, and suggesting that these deaths could be avoided.

The authors found that men with high school or lower levels of education were at greater risk of firearm homicide than those who received post-secondary education in all four countries.

When also considering race within these populations in Brazil and the U.S., the authors found that Black men in the U.S. and Black men in Brazil were among the groups at the highest risk of homicide, compared to Hispanic and white men.

In the U.S. in particular, Black men with lower educational attainment were 14 times more likely to die due to firearm homicide than comparably educated white men, and, in these groups, firearm homicides accounted for three quarters of the difference in overall mortality risk between Black and white men.

Black American men with low educational attainment were two to four times more likely to die by firearm homicide than Brazilian Black or white men, as well as men from Mexico. And Black American men who received post-secondary education were 30 times more likely to die by firearm homicide than comparably educated white men.

The effect of race on firearm homicide was much greater in the U.S. than in Brazil, where differences in men’s risk of firearm mortality were mostly due to differences in education, and where a higher education reduced the relative risk of firearm homicide among men of all races by similar amounts.

When focussing on suicide in the U.S., the pattern changed and the risk of firearm suicide was higher among young white men than Black or Hispanic men. The authors note that most people who survive a suicide attempt do not try again – thus, restricting access to firearms could avert tens of thousands of suicide deaths.

“Failure to address firearms as a major cause of mortality for Black men in the U.S. will hamper efforts to reduce disparities in mortality and improve life expectancy for Black men,” says co-author Anna Dare, a resident in U of T’s department of surgery and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital.

“Interventions that reduce exposures to firearms are crucial, and well-supported by research and international comparisons. There is also a clear need to address the broader cultural, social and economic factors that contribute to such marked differences in mortality.”

The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and U of T’s Connaught Global Challenge.

Solving Toronto's gun problem: U of T researcher draws on gang experience in Toronto Star op-ed

perry.king — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 20:14:36 +0000

Solving Toronto's gun problem: U of T researcher draws on gang experience in Toronto Star op-ed

perry.king Wed, 01/09/2019 - 15:14

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Adam Ellis, a U of T researcher who once belonged to a street gang, addresses the city's public health approach to reducing gun violence in a Toronto Star op-ed (photo by Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Topic

City & Culture

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Cities

Crime

Faculty of Arts & Science

Guns

In response to escalating gun violence in Toronto last year, the city adopted a public health approach to gun violence. That includes a version of the Interrupters program, which has been used in Chicago. The program recruits ex-gang members to intervene with young people to negotiate non-violent solutions to conflict.

But Adam Ellis, a University of Toronto researcher who was once a gang member who carried a gun for protection, writes in the Toronto Star that there are “no definitive studies” that support such an approach.

“First, would former gang members have changed my mind about violence? Probably not. Did you listen to anyone when you were a teenager?” writes Ellis, who is working on his PhD at U of T's Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies.

“We need to start from zero, conduct research and bring the best thinkers to the table [on this issue]. I mean, if we can put people into space can we not find new and innovative ways of reducing violence?”

Read Adam Ellis’s Toronto Star op-ed

Canada should consider banning handguns, says U of T expert in New York Times

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 15:02:20 +0000

Canada should consider banning handguns, says U of T expert in New York Times

geoff.vendeville Tue, 07/31/2018 - 11:02

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Jooyoung Lee, an associate professor of sociology, says Canada should consider banning handguns in the wake of deadly shootings in Toronto this summer (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Topic

City & Culture

Faculty of Arts & Science

Like students in his University of Toronto course on guns and mass shootings in U.S. history, Jooyoung Lee had felt Toronto was immune to the kind of gun violence plaguing Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other U.S. cities.

But several deadly gun attacks this summer, including the shooting along the Danforth last week, have shown that “mass shootings are no longer a uniquely American problem,” Lee says in the New York Times.

The associate professor of sociology and California expat argues that Canada should consider banning handguns, as Britain and Australia have done – especially since 62 per cent of gun-related homicides in Canada are committed with handguns.

The Danforth shooting, which was perpetrated by a man who was reported to be mentally ill, also highlights gaps in Canada's health-care system, Lee says.

“My concern is that we will fall back into the comforting stories about how safe Canada is,” Lee says. “My hope is that instead, this time, we open the difficult conversation about whether civilians ought to own handguns, and what it would take to provide humane care for those suffering from mental illness.”

Read the full op-ed in the New York Times

U of T summer course explores contributing factors to mass shootings

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 16 May 2018 16:29:33 +0000

U of T summer course explores contributing factors to mass shootings

noreen.rasbach Wed, 05/16/2018 - 12:29

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The course on mass shootings, taught by Jooyoung Lee of Munk School’s Centre for the Study of the United States, looks at several case studies, from Columbine to Marjory Stoneman Douglas (photo by Evan Doheny)

Topic

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Sociology

Undergraduate Students

While the University of Toronto’s Jooyoung Lee was teaching an American studies course on gun violence last June, the world was marking one year since the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. The tragedy, in which 49 people were killed and more than 50 others were wounded, was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time.

The record was broken just months later, however, when a gunman opened fire at a crowded music festival in Las Vegas, leaving 58 dead and hundreds injured.

“Death tolls are getting higher and mass shooters are getting more sophisticated,” says Lee, an associate professor of sociology and affiliated faculty at the Munk School’s Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS). “Shootings are becoming more frequent, the shooters are becoming more calculated and they’re able to outfit their firearms with modifications to make them even more lethal. Quantitatively, mass shootings are getting worse.”

It’s for this reason that Lee’s latest summer course is an in-depth look at mass shootings in the U.S. The interactive, fourth-year seminar examines several case studies, from the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 – which Lee considers a watershed moment in America’s history – to this year’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. To gain a more thorough understanding of these shootings, students look at the patterns, causes and consequences surrounding them.

“We tend to call mass shootings ‘senseless violence,’" says Lee. “The term ‘senseless’ is often attached to these acts. But to the person committing the crime, it’s not ‘senseless’ at all. There are reasons why they do these things and it’s incumbent on social scientists to try and understand the reasons so that we better understand how to prevent mass shootings.”

As part of their coursework, students are required to write a paper about an aspect of the conversation on gun violence that most fascinates them, whether they’re interested in studying the manifestos of perpetrators, looking at how grief is politicized or examining law enforcement responses to gun crimes.

The course also draws on pop culture references – in the opening class for instance, students dissected gun violence symbolism in Childish Gambino’s viral music video, This Is America. Lee stresses the importance of taking a multi-pronged approach to studying mass gun violence.

“I try to make the class very interdisciplinary. I’m a sociologist, but I use insights from criminology, political science, history, journalism and more,” he says. “I don’t think you can understand mass shootings by looking through just one lens, and many of the perspectives offered by the media can be partial or sensationalized. My hope is that my students leave my class with a more critical ability to decipher between partial truths and the more complicated back stories about why mass shootings are happening.”

Lee doesn’t see a gun-free future for America. But he thinks that understanding mass shootings in greater depth can only help as nations grapple with how to mitigate future violence, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“Canada is not immune to shootings or the conditions that give rise to shootings. I think a lot of what the students learn in this class can help them make sense of instances of violence that are happening in Canada too,” he says. “Ultimately, I hope all my students leave my class with a critical sociological imagination and a sense of radical empathy. I want them to learn to not just see statistics or a soundbite, but to empathize with the people who are affected by mass shootings.”

Gun violence in the U.S.: U of T expert helps undergrads understand school shootings, serial killings and gangs

ullahnor — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 19:58:40 +0000

Gun violence in the U.S.: U of T expert helps undergrads understand school shootings, serial killings and gangs

ullahnor Mon, 06/12/2017 - 15:58

Daviel Lazure Vieira

Author legacy

Daviel Lazure-Vieira

Topic

City & Culture

Guns

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

U.S.

One year ago today, the United States witnessed the deadliest mass shooting in its history when 49 people were killed and 58 others wounded inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

But like the Sandy Hook kindergarten massacre of 2012, the Pulse shooting failed to bring an end to the widespread availability of guns across the U.S.

Jooyoung Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto is teaching a fourth-year undergraduate course this summer on gun violence in the U.S.

“There’s a bit of insularity when we think of cases of gun violence,” Lee explains. “I wanted to show that everybody is affected in some way by gun culture – all communities, even if some are especially more vulnerable yet get the least attention from the public.”

Lee is one of the first two Bissell-Heyd Fellows at U of T's Munk School’s Centre for the Study of the United States, who are provided with resources to conduct further research in American studies, while giving them a platform to showcase their work with students and the general public. Just a few weeks ago, Lee organized a workshop on gun violence and its impact on urban Black communities in the U.S.

Lee’s interest in gun violence goes back to his time as a graduate student. Back then, he was writing his dissertation, which would become his first book, Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central, an ethnographic study of young African American men from South Los Angeles who were trying to make it in the music industry.

National Day of Remembrance & Action commemorated at U of T

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 20:10:37 +0000

National Day of Remembrance & Action commemorated at U of T

geoff.vendeville Tue, 12/06/2016 - 15:10

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University of Toronto staff, students and faculty lay 14 roses in Hart House Circle on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. There was one rose for each victim of the shooting, the worst in Canadian history (photo by Lisa Lightbourn-Lay)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Our Community

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

Women

Guns

Hart House

University of Toronto students, staff and faculty observed the National Day of Remembrance & Action on Violence Against Women across all three campuses on Tuesday.

At Hart House, the U of T community gathered behind a display of 14 red roses – one for each of the women at École Polytechnique shot and killed Dec. 6, 1989, by a man who professed his hatred of feminism. At the end of the Hart House ceremony, attendees placed the roses on a bench at Hart House Circle.

Read CBC story about vigil at U of T

Kirstin Romaine and Carol Tan, a Hart House student ambassador, made stars out of ribbons for the One Million Stars to End Violence community project (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

STEELwool, a project of the United Steelworkers union, brought together veteran and novice knitters for a one-day art installation across all three campuses, of colourful handmade scarves – each tagged with the name of the creator or donor.

The theme of the project was: “Warming all people of any gender, race, age, sexual orientation and ability across U of T”, and the initiative was developed and organized by the USW Human Rights Committee. The scarves will be donated to various charities across Toronto and the GTA.

The display outside Hart House was one of three installations organized by the USW (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Gender-based violence remains a pressing problem and obstacles persist for women in fields like engineering, said Susan McCahan, U of T’s vice-provost of innovations in undergraduate education. There's “a continuing need” to talk about the issue and address it, she added.

“The shooter didn't make up the idea that women are not welcome in an engineering classroom,” she told U of T News in an interview. “He just amplified it to a tragic degree.”

U of T has made important strides in making engineering classrooms more inclusive, McCahan said. Last year, the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering celebrated a record number of female first-year students. Across all programs, 30.6 per cent of new students were women, a higher ratio than that of any other Ontario university and more than double the provincial average.

Work still remains on empowering women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – and that was the message of a temporary installation built by U of T undergraduate engineering students to honour victims on the massacre.

“Although there has been a lot of significant progress in gender equality in STEM, women still face barriers and social stigma,” says a plaque that is part of the installation outside Convocation Hall. “Fight this stigma and ensure that women have support and opportunities to pursue and excel in STEM.”

After Dallas: Professor George Elliott Clarke on human rights, protest and law enforcement

krisha — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 20:26:24 +0000

After Dallas: Professor George Elliott Clarke on human rights, protest and law enforcement

krisha Fri, 07/08/2016 - 16:26

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At the rally in Dallas, Texas, on Thursday, July 7, 2016 to protest the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile before police were killed (LAURA BUCKMAN/AFP/Getty Images)

George Elliott Clarke

Author legacy

George Elliott Clarke

Topic

George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke, Canada's parliamentary poet laureate, is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. An internationally-renowned poet and scholar and the recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, his books include Execution Poems and Whylah Falls.

The murder of Dallas, Texas, law enforcement officers was a cowardly, terrorist response to a recalcitrant, public policy issue: Must black men – especially – inhabit a police state while almost everyone else gets to live in a democracy?

The police repression of black men is not as bad in Canada as it is in the United States, but we have lots of studies that reveal, right here in Canada, how black men – and Indigenous men – are more likely to be harassed, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be beaten or killed while in a dispute with law enforcement, and more likely to be falsely convicted. I argued two years ago in an Op-Ed piece, law enforcement still behaves via-a-vis – black men especially – that we do not have rights to move freely about in the society; that, in brutal fact, the pass laws of "slavery days" still apply to us, for whites feel complete freedom to ask – anytime – who we are, where we're from, where we live, what is our business in any particular place, and, even, "Is that [nice] car really yours?"

While the deaths of white officers and black not-even-suspects (officially) are grievous, we should remember as far back as December 21, 2014, that a lone black gunman shot dead two white New York City police officers in "revenge" for the earlier death-at-police-hands of Eric Garner. The execrable shootings/assassinations of the Dallas, TX, officers can be linked to the new York City incident of 18 months ago.

But we can go back even further here: No less a figure than Malcolm X (1925-65) commanded African-Americans to pick up arms to protect themselves against the violence of white police, who, we should remember, were frequently violators of African-Americans' civil rights during the Civil Rights Movement (1955-65), and were even, sometimes, members of the Ku Klux Klan – a Caucasian, terrorist organization that was mobilized to prevent true black liberation from slavery....Malcolm X's preaching helped to lead to the establishment of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (note the last word of their official name) in 1966, and most of the Panther political programme (when it wasn't calling for free food and free schools for kids) was calling for armed self-defence against the "occupying army" of all-white-police officers in black "ghettoes."

Of course, we should also remember that the BPP demand for militancy and armed self-defence invited the reaction of the Nixon Administration which tacitly unleashed a wave of unprovoked (white) police assassinations of Black Panther Party acolytes, from approximately 1969 to 1973, driving many Panthers into prison (on trumped-up charges) or into exile or into very premature graves. The US Government named this program, "COINTEL," for "counter-intelligence," but its real aim was to prevent the rise of a "messianic" black leader in the U.S. Some have speculated that the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, was itself a result of a de facto COINTEL program....

We should also remember here that, sadly but cyclically, human rights and civil rights advances in the U.S. have often occurred as a result of protest – and pursuant brutality. The union movement succeeded more-or-less peaceably in Canada (via elections of the United Farmers of Ontario and then the first-term Hepburn Ontario Government and then Prime Minister Mackenzie King's tilt to-the-Left in the 1945 federal election), but succeeded with much more bloodiness in the U.S., including union infighting, such as that which led to the assassination of Joseph Yablonski in 1970, not to mention the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in May 1886, which led to the displacement of Labour Day from May 1 to the current September (and essentially apolitical) holiday. (Note: Police agents provocateurs may have been responsible for the Chicago terrorism of 130 years ago.)

Another case in point: A Buddhist priest set himself afire in 1963 to protest the corruption and anti-Buddhist violence of the corrupt, nominally Catholic regime of the U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam. But the first public protest in the U.S. against the Vietnam War was the self-immolation of a Quaker Christian – Norman Morrison – on the steps of the Pentagon in November 1965. What I'm getting at here is, sadly, in the American Republic, with Dr. King's salient example as an exception, violence has been the (distracting) norm in drawing attention to significant public issues: Think of John Brown and his violent – terrorist – campaign against U.S. slavery.

Apart from the Riel rebellions and the FLQ terror campaign of the 1960s, Canadians have been spared the kind of violence that wracks the American Republic (and we might remember that Dallas, TX, is also where a sitting U.S. President was assassinated by a fellow American). Our political system is more flexible, for one thing: Only in Canada could the Parti Quebecois go from being a church-basement 'party" in 1968 to achieving power in Quebec in 1976; similarly, the Reform Party, Wild Rose Party, Confederation of Regions Party, and Social Credit Party – not to mention the New Democratic Party – have all been able to find a level of public support, which makes extremism less "necessary" and politically motivated violence less likely.

Still, none of the above precludes aggrieved minorities – whether the "Sons of Freedom" in the 1950s or some Quebecois in the 1960s and/or Native activists at Kanasetake, QC, in 1990 – from instituting State-shaking violence as a means of seeking redress to fundamental disparities. Word to the wise – and to the socially conscious....

I dedicate these remarks to the memory of the great Africadian socialist Burnley "Rocky" Jones.

I end with King: "We shall overcome."

(For more on the events in Dallas, Minnesota and Louisiana, read a Q & A with U of T experts)

Guns

Gun violence: U of T alumnus developing tool to screen U.S. patients for gun injury risk

Investment in at-risk communities needed to reduce gun violence, U of T's Jooyoung Lee tells TVO's The Agenda

'You could avoid huge numbers of deaths': U of T researcher on gun fatalities in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

U of T researchers find firearm mortality in the Americas highest among young men, links to education and race

Read a Q&A with U of T researcher Prabhat Jha on the study in The Lancet Public Health

Solving Toronto's gun problem: U of T researcher draws on gang experience in Toronto Star op-ed

Read Adam Ellis’s Toronto Star op-ed

Canada should consider banning handguns, says U of T expert in New York Times

Read the full op-ed in the New York Times

U of T summer course explores contributing factors to mass shootings

Gun violence in the U.S.: U of T expert helps undergrads understand school shootings, serial killings and gangs

Read more about the book

Read more about Lee's research

National Day of Remembrance & Action commemorated at U of T

Read more about the commemorations

Read CBC story about vigil at U of T

Read more about the installation

After Dallas: Professor George Elliott Clarke on human rights, protest and law enforcement