I’m glad to hear that all of the Dopers seem to be OK, albeit personally affected by the tragedy. No idea why I thought Muffin lived in Toronto, or why that’d matter in a city of a few million people, but so goes one’s thought process when posting just before bed.
The family statement is awfully well crafted and quickly released. I’m guessing a decent family attorney or PR professional on retainer.
I guess we’ll just never know Mr. Hussain’s motivations for committing this horrible crime. Wonder how he got the gun (in Canada!) if he was nuts enough to get committed?
There are things here that don’t add up. I wouldn’t assume that “we’ll never know” because this is the subject of intensive investigation, particularly since Toronto had already ramped up its anti-gun program before this happened, and this just gives it extra impetus.
To the best of my knowledge, getting a handgun requires a special restricted-weapon permit and for an ordinary citizen the only acceptable justification is sport shooting associated with membership in a recognized gun club. It’s essentially inconceivable that someone with serious mental health issues could ever get such a permit. The other option would imply that this supposedly quiet, soft-spoken and allegedly harmless person had a network of criminal connections that supplied him with a handgun. You can’t just casually borrow or steal a handgun since almost no one has one.
We need facts, not what may be a self-serving sanctimonious public statement from the family. I hope they investigate the living shit out of the entire family and get to the facts.
Getting a gun in Toronto is not hard, not easy like walking into a store and picking out a glock or sig saur, but not especially hard. A shit load of hoops and a hand gun registry if you want it legally, but if you can’t be bothered with legalities then usually the easiest way is to pick up what you want in the States and bring it through on a normal game day ie football or hockey.
Previously, there was no real reason to tool up, Cops always came down with big boots on fire arm related crime. This year Toronto is seeing a surge in firearm related crime, and while previous generations of bangers kept their public service killings in house, a fair number of recent shootings have not seen any care to make sure civillians are not caught in the middle.
A working assumption is that the drug trade is going through a contraction with the oncoming legalization of weed, and new players are intruding on the incumbents in the remaining vice trades. For the moment Hussains reasons are unknown, he cleared several people before engaging so it was not strictly a random spree.
I heard a news report this morning that said he had a previous incident with the police where he said he was like the Joker and he liked explosions; that sounded pretty random to me.
CBS was told by a police source that Hussain visited ISIS websites and lived for some time in Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan. Other outlets are reporting that his older brother has gang ties, although the brother is currently hospitalized in a coma, which the family attributes to a stroke.
And the family spokesman is indeed a professional publicist (and progressive Muslim activist). Nothing wrong with any of that, of course; just context.
Or he could have just bought one from a gun show in the USA and brought it back in the trunk of a car. Or he knew one criminal. Or someone in his family had an illegal gun. Or a friend.
I don’t have a permit and I don’t know any criminals, but I am absolutely confident I could have a gun and ammunition in a week if I wanted one. The border’s not far from Toronto, there’s always a gun show somewhere, and I can peel off a few hundred bucks for a used 10mm and a box of rounds.
I get that he was known to the cops, he just bypassed an indian dude and said he was not going to shoot him, before lighting up the cafe and that does not seem random.