Toronto mourned Safiullah Khosrawi this past week. He was shot to death on Monday afternoon while walking home from Woburn Collegiate Institute in Scarborough. He was in Grade 10, and he was 15 years old.

Police have arrested a suspect in the shooting. He’s 15, too.

It gets worse. In Hamilton, by the end of the week, police were investigating the shooting of another boy. He was badly injured when someone shot into his home. He’s 7.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but let’s say it anyway: 15-year-olds shouldn’t have to fear deadly violence just going about their day in Canada’s biggest city. And children should be safe inside their own homes everywhere.

These incidents would be shocking enough if they were isolated. But they’re not. There’s an epidemic of gun violence in Toronto, the Greater Toronto region and much of the rest of the country. The city recorded a record 490 shootings last year, and things aren’t getting better in the first weeks of 2020.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that the Trudeau government is showing little sign of taking quick action on the plague of handguns as it gets down to business in its new mandate.

At a cabinet retreat in Winnipeg this past week, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair laid out the government’s plans on gun violence.

He made it clear the priority is a ban on the sale of “military-style assault rifles,” with a buy-back program to follow. Far back in the line is action to curb the availability of handguns.

This is getting things exactly backwards. Banning assault rifles is a fine idea, and the government is right to propose it. But Canada’s gun problem is overwhelmingly not about the kind of multi-shot, rapid-fire weapons that are so often the instrument of death in the mass shootings that take so many lives in the United States.

Mercifully, those incidents are very rare in this country, although the spillover effect of massive publicity south of the border may make it seem that assault rifles are the weapon of choice here as well.

They’re not. The shootings that have become all too common in Toronto and other Canadian cities are perpetrated, almost all of them, by people wielding handguns.

If the government wants to limit gun violence in this country, it will have to tackle the issue of proliferating handguns, as politically difficult as that may seem.

Unfortunately, while Blair has been leading the charge on this issue, the Liberals seem to have slipped back on the urgency of tackling handguns.

When Blair was appointed to cabinet in August, 2018, as minister of border security and organized crime reduction, his mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tasked him with leading an examination of “a full ban on handguns and assault weapons.”

Yet in December, when he became public safety minister, his mandate letter included banning assault rifles only. On handguns, it speaks only of working with provinces and territories “to give municipalities the ability to further restrict or ban handguns” — the position the Liberals campaigned on last year.

This is an unworkable and ineffective idea. The idea that individual cities can usefully impose bans on handguns defies logic. Even aside from the fact that Toronto, the city hardest hit by gun violence, would need permission from the Ford government, which says it’s against any such ban.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Fighting the type of violence that took the life of young Safiullah Khosrawi will, of course, take much more than gun control. Governments must address the underlying causes of gang shootings, poverty and inequality.

But neither should they kick meaningful gun control so far down the road that it disappears from view. The Trudeau government should step up the urgency on halting the spread of the weapons that wreak so much havoc in this country: handguns.