Panhandling a Free Ride for Youth

This past week, Toronto experienced it's 51st homicide of 2007. In this particular case, a man was stabbed to death after an altercation with four panhandlers. Apparently this man had refused to give them money. The four accused range in age from 21 to 22. This got me thinking. I'm around this age and I would never think to do that, or think to be homeless. What causes these kids to go out and do these things. One of the most common explanations that left wingers put fourth is some kind of a failure in the system to protect these youths or to ensure their safety in shelters so they're forced to turn to this.

In Canada, very few people are ever forced to turn to that lifestyle. For the most part, your average street kids actually come from fairly well off families. They're lazy and refuse deal with the rules of their parents and of society. While there maybe some legitimate cases where youths turn to this lifestyle due to lack of jobs or abusive families, they are a minority. This lack of respect for rules is also why they avoid homeless shelters. The shelters don't give them infinite freedom. They cannot smoke, drink, or do drugs in them which they somehow feel to be going to far. They still seem to understand that they need money to support their habits. That's how that man got killed. People are beginning to wise up and are not giving money to these people. We will likely see an increase in similar acts of violence committed by aggressive panhandlers.

So what do we do. Well, aggressive panhandling is supposedly illegal but there seems to be a lack of will to enforce it. I would go one step further and make all panhandling illegal with enforcement. NDPers and people like OCAP need to realize that panhandling is not an appropriate lifestyle and it is not in the best interests of these people to allow them to keep doing it. There needs to be programs and enforced laws in place to get these people off the street. Our nation's cities will be better for it. We won't have incidents like what happened in Toronto, and the former panhandlers will have better lives in the end.