Canadian Teen's Slaying Kindles U.S.-Style Gun Control Debate

A woman leaves flowers at the downtown Toronto site where Jane Creba was shot while shopping with her sister a day after Christmas. Crime has become a hot campaign issue leading up to parliamentary elections next Monday. (By Frank Gunn -- Canadian Press Via Associated Press)

TORONTO -- Jane Creba, 15, was browsing the Boxing Day sales with her older sister when she started crossing the street to look for sneakers. She stepped into a spray of gunfire between rival teenage gangs in the middle of the busy downtown shopping district.

Creba died from a single bullet, and six other people were wounded. The Dec. 26 incident climaxed a year of sensational shootings here, propelling the issue of gun violence to the top of the national debate during an election season.

The death of the bright 10th-grader brought a call by Prime Minister Paul Martin for a ban on handguns, which are already tightly regulated. It also prompted a chorus of demands for tougher laws and more police in a country that prides itself on safety and moderation.

"It never used to be like this," said Mabel Clarke, 74, who lives downtown. "You used to be able to walk on the main street, even at night. Now I can't walk anywhere without looking over my shoulder."

Toronto posted a 15-year high in the rate of homicides with firearms in 2005, and the press and the public have begun to fret that the country is becoming infected by the lethal ways of the United States.

"Canadians deserve safe streets. Toronto isn't Detroit. Vancouver isn't south Los Angeles," Martin said. "We are not going to allow our cities to fall into mindless violence."

But in the campaign leading up to next Monday's parliamentary elections, Martin's opponents have lambasted him for failing to get tough with the United States to stop the smuggling of weapons across the border.

"This is the first government that couldn't control the flow of guns," Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper said in a televised debate last week.

During the campaign, all four major parties have endorsed longer mandatory minimum sentences for gun offenses, more police and tougher border controls.

"Make no mistake, a Conservative government is going to crack down on crime in this country," vowed Harper, the current front-runner in opinion polls.

The heated rhetoric has glossed over some nuances, however. Canada's overall homicide rate is largely unchanged and remains about one-third of that of the United States. Last year, Toronto had 52 gun-related homicides; Chicago and Los Angeles, roughly comparable in size, had 338 and 366, respectively.

Furthermore, the number of such homicides in Canada has dropped by one-third since 1991. And gun control advocates say an even more precipitous decline in the number of homicides with rifles and shotguns -- a two-thirds drop in 15 years -- is a consequence of tighter licensing and registration laws enacted in the 1990s.