On average, 135 Canadians every year are struck by lightning. Some are left brain damaged or blind or deaf; they may experience comas and seizures or heart attacks. An average of 10 per year die from the electrocution. As far as lightning goes, the most dangerous place in Canada is Southern Ontario.

This is interesting information, and it is horrifying to consider that, on any given day while going about your business, you or someone you love may be seriously injured or killed by a bolt that literally comes from the sky. But we are reassured by the knowledge that, as terrible as it is for those whose lives are affected, the odds of it happening to us are incredibly tiny. So we are mostly unafraid of the rain. We go out and live our lives without undue terror at the prospect of falling victim to the lightning menace.

All of this comes to mind, sadly, because the Toronto media has once again been caught up in gun-scare fever. The apparently random shooting deaths of two 25-year-old men on Richmond near Bathurst — like the “Boxing Day” and “Just Desserts” killings of years past — has raised the spectre of sudden and unexpected death by gunshot in the minds of many Torontonians. In a press conference on the weekend, the mothers of the slain young men pled for information from the public, one of them saying, “They need to be found if this city is going to keep breathing. They killed our children. They can kill your children. They’re out there.”
Our hearts go out to these women and to their families. We can imagine no loss more painful than the violent early death of one of your children. The killer or killers of these young men must be caught and punished. Steps must be taken to minimize the possibility of such shootings in the future.

And yet. They can kill your children — this is a headline from which terror springs. While the families mourn, as they must, the rest of us must force ourselves to keep a sense of perspective. In 2006, to take a recent year for which statistics are readily available, there were a total of 190 shooting deaths in all of Canada. The overwhelming majority of the victims of those shootings knew their murderers (as do the overwhelming majority of all murder victims). Only a handful of people in any year are killed as bystanders or random targets. One almost certainly has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being killed by a bullet from an unmotivated attacker’s gun. They can kill your children, yes. But they almost certainly will not.
We bring this up not to draw a moral equivalency between acts of nature and acts of cold-blooded malice, for there is none. And we do not mean to minimize the deaths of any victims of violence. We simply want to point out, as paranoia seems on the verge of taking hold, that Toronto’s streets are not an obstacle course of gunfire.

In any given year, 4,000 Canadians or so die of the flu. Over 1,000 people per year die in workplace injuries. Roughly 2,500 die in car accidents. It is no solace to the bereaved families — nothing is, or can be — but the simple truth is that the SUV those two young men were sitting in posed an exponentially greater likelihood of killing them than a passing stranger with a gun did. They were unlucky, tremendously unlucky. It should make us sad. It should make us angry. But it does not need to make us afraid.

The truth is that we might be struck by lightning or shot randomly in the street or die in a car accident — premature death is as old as the world, and no less saddening for it. But the truth is also that Canadians in 2008 are far less likely to die a premature death than almost any people almost anywhere at almost any point in history. The truth is that the murder rate in Canada today is more than a third lower than it was in the mid-1970s.

And the truth is that fear of each other, of strangers, of the society we live in — they can kill your children — poses a far greater threat to our city than do guns or lightning or cars. When fear takes hold of the hearts of a population, their shared civic spaces become uglier, helping each other becomes infinitely harder, building a community becomes nearly impossible. We exist on trust in each other, on a sense of shared responsibility and mutual respect. And it almost always works. As sad as we may be when tragic occasions arise, we should remember that.