Shooting suspect had joined gun club in the fall

ANTHONY REINHART

Globe and Mail

2008.01.16


A Scarborough man accused in the shooting death of an innocent bystander outside a Yonge Street strip bar on the weekend became a full member of a target-shooting club north of Toronto last October.

As such, Edward Paredes, 23, had successfully completed eight probationary shoots under close scrutiny of fellow members of The Grange Firearms Association. The club is one of seven, with a combined membership of about 2,000, that convene at the Target Sports Center in Whitchurch-Stouffville, a combination gun shop and shooting range a 30-minute drive north of Mr. Paredes's parents' suburban home.

"We have the most stringent probation of any gun club in Ontario, I would say," Jason Jenkins, president of the 400-member Grange club, said yesterday, adding that Mr. Paredes joined "in the last 12 months."

That stringency, along with the many regulatory hoops through which Mr. Paredes had to jump before he ever fired a shot at the range, has made the death of 42-year-old John O'Keefe all the more shocking to handgun enthusiasts.

"This is not indicative of sport-shooters," Mr. Jenkins said. "It's a complete anomaly."

Since Mr. O'Keefe's death outside the Brass Rail early Saturday, politicians have renewed calls for an outright ban on handguns, while legal gun owners have renewed their counter-arguments, saying current restrictions are more than adequate and that a ban would not deter most gun crime, which involves illegally obtained weapons.

To obtain a handgun licence, Mr. Paredes had to pass federal background checks, take a safety course, pass several tests and explain why he wanted the gun. While a small percentage of licences are granted to people who need to carry a handgun for work, or in rare cases, personal protection, most go to target shooters and collectors.

Target shooters must then join an approved club in order to get a permit to transport their gun between their home and a firing range - using the most direct route available, with no stops along the way. Further transport permits are required before an owner can take the gun anywhere else, and the destinations are limited to a small number of locations, such as repair shops, gun shows, or other firing ranges.

At Target Sports, where the Grange club operates, members have to swipe a key card and enter a personal identification number to enter an anteroom outside the shooting range. There, they write their name on a sign-in sheet, then swipe the card and re-enter their PIN to get into the range proper.

James Cox, who owns Target Sports, said there is no electronic or written record of Mr. Paredes having visited the range on the day leading up to Mr. O'Keefe's shooting. Further, Mr. Cox said he did not know where Mr. Paredes bought his handgun, though "I know we sold him ammunition" for a nine-millimetre weapon.

Such ammunition is typically used in a semi-automatic pistol from which single shots can be fired in succession, without the need to reload each time.

While Mayor David Miller and Councillor Michael Walker decried handgun ownership as inappropriate, Mr. Cox called these comments "very narrow-minded" in light of the thousands of enthusiasts who safely enjoy target shooting, including many Toronto urbanites, from "students to seniors, blue-collar workers to corporate executives."

Asked if it would be safer to require owners to leave their guns at the range, Mr. Cox said that would create "big, huge weapons caches for people to break into." In Ontario alone, there are 1,200 gun clubs and 150,000 legal handguns.

Across the street from the tidy, two-storey brick home where Mr. Paredes lived with his parents, a neighbour named Dave said the only shooting he ever saw at 55 Pogonia St. involved the basketball hoop on the driveway.

"He didn't seem like a bad kid," the man said, though he did not profess to know him well. "That's weird, you know?"