The June 2 shooting incident in the food court of downtown Toronto’s Eaton Centre that killed two people and injured five, was a scene that invited comparisons with an incident on Boxing Day seven years previously, in which teenaged Jane Creba was killed in a crossfire of gun play between rival groups of criminal youth.

Incidents like this produce a predictable outburst. Members of the public are shocked. Family and friends publicly suffer the effects of the tragedy. Politicians pronounce on the need for tougher sentencing for criminals. Media commentators compete to show their abhorrence.

All of this fuels an atmosphere of panic. Meanwhile, academics attempt to provide explanations, but, in order to do, so we need the research access and funding to conduct meaningful studies. Sadly, both are in short supply. The problem is that we do not really fully understand why the Canadian criminal street culture has become so violent. There are many hypotheses and a lot of opinions, but we are in a policy fog about what to do about it.

There is some research, though, and what it indicates is not very encouraging. Several years ago, a Canadian criminologist named Fred Desroches did a couple of interesting and highly regarded studies on serious career criminals. If one single point stands out from his work, for me it is the relative absence of firearms in connection with criminal activity in Canada. This is in accord with people’s general experience. Most Canadians over the age of 40 can easily remember a time when gun-crime was all but absent from the nightly news. That was then.

As events have shown, violent crime involving guns appears to be on the increase. Analysis of homicide statistics reveals some interesting patterns (see the accompanying chart). What they reveal is a long-term downward trend in gun-homicide generally. Murders committed with so-called “long-guns” (rifles and shotguns) have declined quite precipitously over the last 30 or so years, and with them the rate of domestic homicide.

However, from about 1991 the prevalence of handguns surpassed long-guns in Canadian homicide statistics. This “crossover” indicated a change in the pattern of homicide in Canada. Now there are statistically greater numbers of murders between strangers and acquaintances and fewer pertaining to “private” violence.

Many shootings now take place in highly visible public locations and this specific type of gun crime has gained considerable public attention, with good reason. There is undoubtedly a climate of heightened anxiety, if not outright fear, concerning the violence of young men.

Last year, together with colleagues Pat Erikson, Jennifer Butters and Serge Brochu, I published a report on guns and violence among high-school students in Toronto and Montreal. It was based on some survey research and we were very careful not to overstate the findings. What we found was indicative of a possible emergence of a new kind of gun culture and an acceptance of violence among young people involved in criminal offending.

However, we could not say much about that culture because surveys, or at least our surveys, are not sufficiently probing. What does appear to be the case is that the culture of street crime in Canada is becoming “pistolized.”

What are the processes by which this happens? There are many hypotheses. Some people blame violence in the media, others point to the emergence of youth gangs. Some say it is to do with changing patterns of drug use. The emergence of ever more serious forms of criminality has also been blamed on bad parenting and family breakdown. There are even grounds to think that prison makes people more violent and helps to spread knowledge about guns and the motivation to use them.

We simply do not know enough about what is happening in relation to the pistolization of street crime in Canada and that is a great failure. It is a failure because, every time an incident like the Eaton Centre shooting happens, we simply repeat the same patterns of indignation and crime panic without doing anything constructive. There are many social workers, youth workers, teachers, community police officers and others striving to make a difference to the street crime problem in Canadian cities. But, without an adequate understanding of the cultural basis of the problem and without informed evidence about what policies might work in changing that culture, all that effort is very little help.

Most public discourse about this problem is a confused mixture of surreptitious racism, tough-on-crime rhetoric and finger-pointing. This is not a simple problem and simple solutions, like gang task forces, tougher sentencing or more youth workers, are unlikely to have any real impact.

There needs to be a national study concerning the pistolization of street crime in Canada involving a range of expertise, including anthropologists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, urban geographers and others who have the research skills to cast some light on the problem.

Sadly, that takes time, and most politicians who determine the climate of research funding in this country are more interested in the short-term problem of how to get re-elected. For them, the atmosphere of confusion and crime panic seems to work very well because it offers an opportunity to appear decisive.

We need more than the appearance of decisiveness. We need the intelligence to be decisive in an effective way. And that requires thoughtful research, not easy rhetoric.