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WARMINGTON: Enjoying a McDonald's Big Mac and Fries should not mean ducking gunshots

· Toronto Sun

Everyone should be able to enjoy a Big Mac and large fries in your local McDonald’s without the worry of being struck by a bullet.

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But in Toronto, there are no guarantees.

How can any person dining in or doing takeout through the drive thru know who is sitting beside them or in the car in front or behind them? How can the staff know if someone they are serving is the target of the gang world?

They have no way of knowing. You just have to hope you are not in the line of fire, crossfire, or ricochet. Far too many people have been killed in similar scenarios than we could ever list here. There is never any justice for them. They are just dead – many of them forgotten by society with the exception of their families. Toronto just cleans up its violent crime scenes and moves on.

Calling it a “firearm discharge,” Toronto Police say at 9:45 p.m. Monday at a popular McDonald’s franchise at Eglinton Ave. E. and McCowan Rd., gunmen outside shot at the building.

Award-winning 680 News reporter Carl Hantske posted a video to X that not only showed at least four gunshot holes in the windows but the seats at tables right in the path of where those bullets would have travelled.

Gunmen in masks

Police say the “suspects are males wearing all black clothing and masks” and “fled in a light-coloured vehicle.” Sounds similar to those shooting into synagogues, business people’s houses, or the U.S. Consulate. The motive this time is not clear but whenever someone shoots into a building where there are people inside, it’s attempted murder as far as I am concerned. There were “no injuries” but there was “evidence of gunfire located on scene.”

Yes, there was. A shattered widow that clearly came from a gunshot. It looks like only a window was broken in this shooting so perhaps it won’t dominate the news cycle for long. No one was killed or hurt, so maybe nobody will care much about a shooting into a Scarborough McDonald’s on a Monday night.

But this is another example of why people should care and people should be outraged and of why crime needs to be a ballot question in the upcoming municipal election. And crime questions on any debate stage should not just be about police deployments and staffing, but also about courts, easy and cheap bail for as low as $2,000 , sentencing, and zero tolerance toward violence. This is another one of these Broken Windows dilemmas.

In the famous Atlantic essay Broken Windows, social city builders James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling argued “social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in rundown ones.”

Now, breaking windows is somewhat different from shooting windows but the overall concept that was adopted to clean up New York in the early 1990s proved to work because they stopped ignoring the smaller crimes with a view to getting a handle on the bigger crimes.

My feeling is the more boots that are walking a beat, the safer the community will be. There is nothing better than that personal touch and communication with a police officer working on trying to catch the person who violated your family. It’s better than any online reporting approach.

Cops seek help stopping these crimes

Just this week police are promoting a portal, which can handle 98 different languages, that people can call to report crime — which matches society’s trend to push the can down to the online reporting-style and never speak directly to an officer. It’s cost efficient but not confidence instilling.

A good example of following a process to report crime occurred Monday after police put out a security photo of a suspect in a hate crime investigation in which a menorah was damaged. David Menzies of Rebel News had a recent interview with a suspect matching the photo but was told he had to go through the “process” of calling a local division for assessment before it could be pushed up to the Hate Crimes Unit. The operator said she could not take the information.

Perhaps the new portal will be more efficient because process and bureaucracy are the criminal’s best friend because investigating gets tied up in red tape.

What works better is a team of officers who work the whole night and chase every lead that is gathered from witnesses and security cameras and modern communications technology on these shooters and get them in handcuffs as fast as possible. Make the criminal element understand that when they run away, they are actually being chased in real time.

Easier said than done but since the leave-the-lesser-crimes approach leads to bigger crimes, maybe the public is ready for a tougher ride for those who shoot at a benign McDonald’s where innocent families are!

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