I just received a Crimespot email with a notice of a shooting on Bannatyne. That was the shooting of a 19 year old outside of a night club yesterday. It took me a minute, then I remembered I had already heard about the incident on the news the previous day. And my thought was, oh right, it was just at a night club.
What does that even mean? Is it becoming so common place that I can pass it off as a regular occurrance at a downtown nightclub? We have already had our first murder of the year, and we have already had our first youth caught with a loaded machine gun, and now we have had our first nightclub shooting of the year.
I had asked my husband a few days ago about the North End, and how long he felt it had been so bad. His answer was that 10 years ago Selkirk Avenue had stores. It was not full of boarded up businesses and rows of community service organizations. And just today, he added that there were no guns, or if there were, they were shot guns.
But now we have handguns and machine guns. And a person being shot at a nightclub is not as horrific an incident as it was a few years ago. How many people were shot last year by guns in Winnipeg? A lot. Wasn't it 10 years ago when there were a few drive by shootings that involved gangs going after each other? That's when we heard about shootings. But not now. Now it is so common place that we seem to just brush it off. It's just another day in the hood, or just another day at a nightclub downtown.
We cannot let guns and shooting become the normal for Winnipeg.
This is not the Winnipeg I want to live in, where guns are found in the hands of youths, and people are being shot at nightclubs. I don't want to have a Winnipeg where people are dying in their homes by those weilding guns. And I don't want the sound of a shotgun to be a normal sound in my neighbourhood.
This is our city, and we need to take care of it. We are not 'rats' or 'squealers' if we protect and take care of what is ours. And Winnipeg is ours. We should be taking care of it.
I lived in winnipeg for a long time. Unfortunately in the last 15 years it has progressively become worse crimewise. I sold my house, uprooted my family and left the province in 2008. I just couldn't take the preferential treatment the aboriginal population was and still is receiving from all levels of government. Over the years, I watched as families left the reserves and came to live in Winnipeg. They had no job skills, little education and quite often had substance abuse problems. I watched as they transformed older neighborhoods into urban reserves. Quietly, block by block, the transformation took place until an entire neighborhood was now a "hood".
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