Last Sunday’s Star Newspaper did an extended piece entitled “Helping victims avoid the next bullet”. It’s an article that Louis March, founder of Zero Gun Violence Movement (ZGVM), would most certainly be aware of.

March, who is friend of and a regular contributor to our newspaper, founded ZGVM in 2013 because in his words, “after those shootings [Danzig St, Scarborough in 2012 and Eaton Centre in the same year] I realized that the gun violence was just getting worse and not better and it was affecting young people who I’d been working with for the longest time.”

The Star article highlights a Sunnybrook Hospital project called Breaking the Cycle of Violence with Empathy (BRAVE). The program is designed to address the residual effects (trauma) on many shooting victims. While treatment for trauma resulting from serious illnesses like heart attacks, cancers, and catastrophic events like road accidents etc. are quite common, Sunnybrook’s program is the first of its kind in Canada.

And not a moment too soon because the article states that “amid Toronto’s rising gun violence, the number of people injured or killed in shootings has more than doubled in less than a decade, from 103 in 2014 to 217 in 2020. At Sunnybrook, that’s translated into a dramatic spike in patients: last year, the hospital treated 129 gunshot victims, roughly one every three days. In 2014, there were 63.”

There is good reason why Michael Lewis, a young Black man, who works in the program as case manager provides support for patients who chose to seek help – the program found that about 85 percent of participants were racialized, and of that number 50 percent were Black.

This is an astonishing statistic not because we were unaware that too many black faces were featuring in shooting reports, but that the percentage of people who identified as Black are just 9 percent of Toronto’s population. That means that, more than any other community, we have a large number of persons that have a negative effect on the Black community because when the trauma goes untreated, many turn up in hospital with new gun and knife wounds. They become unemployed or unemployable, lapse into drug use, petty crimes or commit gun crimes themselves.  They become a drain on financially overstretched families and a bad influence on their siblings.

The BRAVE program is more than timely. In truth, for the sake of the community we wish it had happened sooner. The program, which was launched in 2020 and receives $100,000 in grants from the city, and, according to a York University finding, BRAVE has already experienced success – they have found that participants “…had been inspired to make big life changes, such as pursuing education and cutting off “stupid friends” who were a bad influence.”

Clearly BRAVE is a program we must embrace and to advocate for the establishment for more programs of its kind.

So while our friend Louis March is carrying on his struggle to stem the flow of guns and to stop the violence that ensues, he would be happy to know that BRAVE is succeeding in reducing the pain at the back end.