The apparent murder weapon in Thursday’s attack was a crossbow, or at least the bolt (arrow), and according to Sun columnist Joe Warmington, “It’s not Toronto’s first crossbow-related slaying scene and one wonders how many more will be tolerated by the public, and those who govern, before there is a move to make them more difficult to buy and kept better track of.”
According to Fox News, the victims were two men and a woman.
As this case unfolds just across Lake Ontario from Roosevelt Beach, N.Y. in the state’s northwest region near Buffalo, it provides an uncomfortable truth for the gun prohibition lobby operating in the United States. Getting rid of guns is not going to prevent mayhem and murder. Weapons that predate firearms by perhaps a couple of hundred years are as lethal today as they were millennia ago.
Toronto is the capitol of Ontario. It is a city with its own criminal violence problems, in a province with what may be as messed up a justice system as one could find anywhere south of the Canadian border.
Yesterday, the Toronto Sun also reported that the Ontario Court of Appeal just overturned life sentences for a pair of drive-by killers because the now-retired judge in that case may have been too harsh. So now, Anthony Grant and his getaway driver, Devon Vivian, will apparently get a break, and an award-winning justice columnist at the newspaper is none too happy.
Writing about how Superior Court Justice Eugene “Tex” Ewaschuk’s harsh sentences had been overturned, the Sun’s Michele Mandel wrote, “The appeal court ruled that he’d been too hard on the little darlings.”
The court scenario may seem familiar to anyone in this country who has marveled at how repeat offenders glide through the justice system’s revolving doors, and the comments about the crossbow fit right in with the alarmist rhetoric against so-called “assault weapons.”
Still, in either country, neither instrument is responsible for more than a small percentage of slayings.
But the cases in Ontario carry a possible lesson that the public can keep in perspective. If guns are not available, evil can be accomplished with other weapons, even medieval ones. And, if some bleeding heart appeals court judges have their way, the perpetrators will get far better treatment than their victims.
