Two Canadian teens kill another,prompting government to tighten gun control laws

Two teens are charged with murdering another teen in a school shooting that prompted outraged provincial and local officials to call for tighter federal gun control laws.

Photo: Two Canadian teens kill another,prompting government to tighten gun control laws

The teens both 17 were charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the May 23 fatal shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute. The shooting came on the heels of a series of recent bomb threats directed at several Canadian schools.

The incidents rattled a country that prides itself on its low crime rate, particularly in comparison to its southern neighbor, the United States.

One of the teens was arrested Sunday, police said, while the second surrendered to authorities Sunday night. They cannot be identified because they are minors.

Manners was shot and killed in a hallway in the school, which is located near a high-crime Toronto neighborhood.

Police planned a news conference Monday to provide more details about the case.

Witnesses have said there was a fight outside the school, and then the shooter followed the victim inside, where he was shot.

The shooting sparked calls for tighter gun control laws.

"We have seen too many shootings result in too many funerals for our young people," Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty wrote Thursday in an open letter to federal party leaders, urging them to push through proposed criminal justice legislation and implement a "real ban" on handguns.

Toronto Mayor David Miller also called for a ban on hand guns.

Handguns are already severely restricted in Canada, and a handgun registry has been in force for more than 60 years.

The incident in Toronto came about a week after at least eight school bomb threats targeting Canadian schools in eastern Canada. A 14-year-old boy was arrested in one of those incidents after an explosive device was found in his school in the eastern province of New Brunswick while six teens in Ontario were also arrested for allegedly writing bomb threats at a local elementary school.

The shooting comes a little more than a month after a gunman killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, an American university, before taking his own life.

In September, a gunman at Montreal's Dawson College killed a student and wounded 19 others before he took his own life.