From next week’s Hill Times column:

Everyone plays their assigned role, like we are trapped in some grim kabuki play that always, always ends the same way.  The gun nuts take to social media, bombarding everyone with all-caps variants on “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  The bigots bleat that “lieberals” and “libtards” are to blame, because they let in Muslims and people whose skin isn’t white – you know, white as a Klansman’s sheet.

And, naturally, Ezra Levant and the winged monkeys at Rebel Media fundraise with it all.

The chiefs of police recite statistics, noting (correctly) that crime is down, insisting (incorrectly) that the police could do more if they simply had bigger budgets.  The conservative politicians tweet “thoughts and prayers,” which has become 21^st Century code for “I plan to do nothing.”  And the liberal politicians wring their hands and pass laws that will also achieve nothing – because there are already nearly eight million firearms in the country.  Now.

And, by the by: more than a million of those guns – like the one the killer used the Sunday before last – are already restricted or prohibited. His was stolen in a break-in in Saskatoon a few years back, before it commenced slouching towards Toronto’s Danforth Avenue.

And we in the media?  We always play our assigned roles, too.  Those on the conservative side of the spectrum shrug, and regurgitate the talking points of the NRA and its foul ilk.  They call handgun bans “virtue signalling” symbolism – forgetting, or not knowing, that all of politics is about symbols, and the ceaseless pursuit of virtue. 

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I didn’t know Reese Fallon.

I may have met her, once, when Beaches-East York MP Nate Erskine-Smith – who did know her – held an anti-racism event in our neighbourhood.  Nate had a number of Young Liberal club members there, helping out. Reese was a member of that club.  I remember feeling sorry for these young people, because a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists had shown up and were disrupting the meeting. It was pretty ugly.

So, I didn’t know her.  I do know, however, that she is still being mourned – she isn’t even in the ground, yet – after she was murdered on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue Sunday night.  She was there for a birthday celebration with friends.  One of her friends was wounded and taken to hospital, too.  That’s what I know.  That’s all that most of us know.

Here, too, something else I know: it was appalling, and wrong, for CBC Radio to devote a lot of time, this morning, to the killer.  In one part, they had what sounded like a professional actor breathlessly read the letter his family sent out.  In another part, they had a youth worker who knew the killer come on, and he related how the killer had “a million-dollar smile” and was “humble and reserved.” It went on and on and on like that, for a long time, on CBC Radio.

I don’t know if any those things are true, either.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.  Personally, I don’t usually associate having “a million-dollar smile” with people who slaughter children on a city street.

What I do know is this: it isn’t just governments that have a role to play in preventing other Reese Fallons from being executed one night.  The media has a role to play, too.

And that role does not include treating the killer with more deference than the killer’s victims.

Before they – innocent children – are even in the ground.

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