On Friday noon, Toronto police shot and killed a man who was carrying a pistol while walking down a street in a downtown area, prompting five surrounding schools to institute precautionary lockdowns, according to city officials.
Toronto Police Chief James Ramer stated at a media briefing that officers who were responding to a complaint of an armed man in the vicinity fired after the suspect engaged them. He refused to provide additional information, citing an ongoing inquiry.
Earlier on Twitter, Toronto police reported that officers had fired and that the suspect, a male in his late teens or early 20s, had been hurt.
The location where Toronto police shot the man is just 130 meters from William G Davis Junior Public School, the last of five schools to exit lockdown.
According to the Toronto District School Board, all school lockdowns were removed within a couple of hours.
The United States is still reeling from two recent mass shootings: the bloodiest school shooting in nearly a decade in Uvalde, Texas, and a racist supermarket massacre in Buffalo, New York.
According to a Reuters witness, Toronto police have stopped approximately 300 meters of traffic near the incident while special investigations detectives complete their inquiry.
Ramer stated, "I realize the trauma and how upsetting this must have been for staff, children, and parents in light of recent events in the United States."
Ramer stated that Toronto police do not yet know all the specifics of the incident, and "I will not guess and compare it to what is occurring in the United States."
Tuesday's school shooting in Texas was one of nearly 200 documented mass shootings in the United States in 2022, the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization, disclosed.
According to a news release, Ontario's Special Investigations Unit is currently investigating the fatal shooting.
In a release, four investigators and three forensic investigators were said to have been assigned to the case.
Premier of Ontario Doug Ford thanked police and emergency personnel on Twitter for their "quick action."
"Thank you to police and emergency personnel for your quick action in Scarborough," he said. "We are very grateful for everything you do to keep our communities safe."
According to a 2021 research by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Canada's firearm homicide rate is 0.5 per 100,000 people, which is significantly lower than the U.S. rate of 4.12 per 100,000 people.
