"It's a cop out. It's an easy way of looking at one symptom rather than addressing a whole disease," Thompson said.
Exactly. And in that way, the same as the U.S. If you take the gang (and even then, mostly inter-gang) violence out of the statistics you will find that violent crime in even the largest U.S. cities is very low-- except for that gang-related crime.
Nowhere in Canada (or the rest of the world for that matter) has there been anything even remotely like the inner city gang culture that has infested our cities. As that cancerous subculture is allowed to take root elsewhere, they'll see similar results.
That is exactly the problem. We can actually learn from some US cities that have tried to fight the gangs and tear them apart.
David Miller and Paul Martin are just playing to their base - and Martin has the Toronto vote all locked up already. All he is doing is suicide - it will cost him critical rural ridings that he narrowly held onto last time.