Youth-in-Training

Every society has its budding hoodlums, its social outcasts, its aspiring gang members, its psychotic offenders running amok through communities and leaving havoc in the wake of their rampages. From their earliest years when they indulge in the destruction of public and private property, finding this gleeful enterprise to their liking, to their later years, sowing fear through their violent destructiveness and the volatility of their collective aspirations to violate society's norms.

How much worse can it get when teens eschew school for the greater pleasures of life on the street with their comrades in arms, their street gangs, the camaraderie of illicit and societally-forbidden enterprise. From car theft to home invasions, inter-gang rivalries and street shootings, they weave their web of violations, flouting the laws of the land, and exhibiting no compassion for those whose lives they destroy in their rampaging violence.

Innocent bystanders shot in the event where gang members face off against one another on street corners. Drive-by shootings, leaving some dead, others wounded. And the community from which they derive huddles in fear, revealing no details to law authorities, fearing for their own safety and that of their children should they be seen to be aiding the police. The general silence that settles over low-income housing estates victimizes the entire community.

For nothing will arrest the activities of the thugs who, despite their depredations on their own society - and the wider community - are able to go on about whatever it is they do, without fear of detection. And when good fortune somehow assists an investigation and those responsible for causing death are apprehended, 'social activists' rise in anger, claiming that the youth are not responsible for what a miserable childhood has led them to.

Six youth ranging in age from 15 to 17 were recently picked up and charged with 52 offences, ranging from robbery to assault, in downtown Toronto. Where they used a metal device - a hammer, a meat tenderizer, to beat random victims ranging in age from 18 to 48, resulting in serious facial and head injuries - while robbing their victims. Punching and kicking individuals they surrounded, inflicting wounds with the steel tenderizer.

Just a fun night out on the town. And the police appearing in court were anxiously attempting to block the release of the marauding youths "because of the severity of the violence". And what timing; the farcical release of a study, the "Roots of Youth Violence", commissioned by the Province of Ontario, coming to the conclusion that social dysfunction and criminality in the city's housing projects occur as a result of endemic, systemic social racism.

This, in a country that has institutionalized and encouraged racial tolerance and communality of purpose in society, where laws mitigate against racism, where the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ensure civility and equality of opportunity. In the United States, Bill Cosby and Barack Obama lashed out at the black community's pathology of absent fathers and disaffected family situations, where the community accepts street youth culture with equanimity.

It is reality, not racism, to observe that social and assisted housing enclaves house single-parent families where the sole parent raising young children abrogates responsibility in teaching ethics and morality, failing to instill the value of education, releasing children into a street environment where the youth rely for emotional support on one another, not parents, and where street crime is endemic and where admiration for drug pushers is fact leading to emulation.

The phenomenon of illegal gun ownership among 'disadvantaged' youth in Toronto has resulted in a horrendous number of homicides. Canadian authorities are currently in the process of having the U.S. co-operate in the extradition of a Chicago-area gun smuggler who succeeded in illegally bringing several hundred handguns into Canada. Of the crime-related guns seized by Toronto police in the last several years, 70% have been supplied illegally from the United States.

Several hundred shooting incidents in Toronto have taken place, resulting in 35 deaths. Some thirty illegal firearms have been traced to the ownership of a Chicago-based arms dealer who illegally smuggled 234 firearms across the U.S. border into Canada. Firearms registered to Ugur Yildiz of Chicago, have been found in Toronto, Barrie, Waterloo, Guelph, Sudbury and Bradford, Ontario.

This man is an obvious supporter of youth entitlement to life in the fast lane of localized enterprising drug trade, of the excitement of living in a community hosting a number of street gangs in frenetically violent opposition to one another; an avuncular champion of murder and mayhem.