Advocates and community members are calling for more social support amid an increase in gun violence across the city, including three fatal incidents in Toronto and Peel overnight. The three separate incidents – two shootings and a stabbing – left three men dead and another three injured. The violence comes just one day after the fatal shooting of a 42-year-old father in Toronto’s Weston area on Sunday – and amid a year of increased gun violence, according to police.
After a decline in firearm-related offences during the pandemic, police data shows that shootings in Toronto have spiked in 2024, up nearly 40 per cent over last year. So far this year, there have been 338 shootings and “firearm related discharges,” according to the figures — the highest since 2020. Thirty-five people have died in shootings so far this year, up from 22 by this point in 2023.
“It’s gotten to a level where we can’t keep up,” Marcell Wilson, founder and president of the One by One Movement, an organization working to decrease violence in the Toronto area, told the Star. “There’s just not enough people, not enough bodies, not enough minds, not enough resources to be able to handle the influx.” The first of the overnight shootings, which took place in the parking lot of Lawrence Allen Shopping Centre just after midnight on Monday, took the life of a man in his mid-20s, according to family members at the scene.
Not long after, police were called to St. Clair Avenue West and .