Every shooting in the city is a horror. But there is a particular combination of sadness and anger and fear that sets in when violence explodes in a crowded public place — a place any of us could imagine ourselves and our families having been. Toronto experienced that after a mass shooting at a street party on Danzig Street in 2012, and a shootout in the Eaton Centre food court that same year. That feeling emerged again on Saturday, when gunfire erupted at the Salsa on St. Clair street festival, sending hundreds of people running scared through alleys and side streets, and leaving two people dead and four others shot.
It was not the only episode of gunfire of the weekend: a shooting in North York Friday night killed a man and injured two others, and a shootout outside a night club in the Port Lands early Sunday morning injured five more people. It’s a Monday for grieving.
