Ezra Levant interviews criminal lawyer Ian Runkel on Toronto’s 2022 Halloween shooting, where a now-20-year-old (under a publication ban) was acquitted of murder after fatally shooting Jefferson Gehrier with an illegal gun during a knife attack. Canadian law permits self-defense even with unlawful firearms if the threat is lethal, yet the accused remains in custody for firearms charges. Runkel warns against misinterpreting the verdict as support for vigilantism, citing cases like Ian Thompson’s where lawful gun owners faced unjust charges, and notes Canada’s rising crime—including home invasions—while questioning police response adequacy. The acquittal underscores legal gray areas but doesn’t justify illegal gun possession, revealing tensions between self-defense rights and urban-rural policing disparities. [Automatically generated summary]
A teenager from Iraq uses an illegal gun to kill someone and claims it's self-defense.
I'll tell you what the jury said and what the Toronto Star said.
It's a feature interview with lawyer Ian Runkel.
You don't want to miss this.
What an interesting story.
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us stay strong tonight can you use an illegal gun to kill someone in self-defense I'll tell you a story from Toronto in the last crazy week.
It's July 10th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I saw the most amazing story in the Toronto Star the other day.
It was confusing for me, and it was confusing for the star.
They didn't know quite what to make of it, who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, because there were guns involved, and they know one thing, they don't like that.
Here, let me read a little bit to you from this story.
It's just so astonishing.
Jury, so there's a jury involved, acquits teen who claimed self-defense in a fatal Toronto school shooting, saying he carried the gun because his neighborhood was like Iraq.
Oh my god, there's so much to digest just in that one headline.
I'm going to read just a sentence or two before I bring in a legal expert to help me chew through this.
A Toronto jury on Friday, so this was last week, acquitted a 20-year-old man of second-degree murder, accepting his claim that he fired four shots in self-defense, believing the victim, 18-year-old Jefferson Gehrier, was lunging at him with a knife outside a high school in the city's East End, or as I would say, just another usual day in the failed state of Toronto.
The fatal shooting, just as classes were ending for the day on Halloween in 2022, drew widespread attention due to the proximity to students, one of whom filmed the incident on their cell phones.
So, yeah, like I say, just another normal one.
I'll just skip ahead.
The man was 17 at the time.
His identity is covered by a standard publication ban.
But what's so incredible to me is that he was packing an illegal gun and he used it to shoot a guy he was afraid of.
And he was acquitted.
Joining us now to talk about this is Ian Runkel, a criminal lawyer who has a popular YouTube channel called Runkel of the Bailey Eland.
Great to see you.
There's so many more nuggets in that story that I'm tempted to read out, but I'd rather have you describe it.
This kid, he was 17 at the time, obviously.
He was a man, was a migrant from Iraq.
And he said that growing up in Greater Toronto was as dangerous as Iraq.
And I guess in his defense, he says he had been shot at before.
And it sounds like this school was almost a war zone.
Where, I mean, I don't know where my sympathies should lie.
And I don't think the Toronto Star knows either, because on the one hand, they hate guns, but they love migrants.
They hate self-defense, but they like this guy.
My head's spinning.
Help me out.
One thing to remember is that self-defense cases don't necessarily have a good guy or a bad guy.
A lot of self-defense cases throughout the Canadian case law are bad guy versus bad guy.
So you can't necessarily assume that.
And people have sort of they say, look, this guy's got an illegal gun.
So what does this mean?
Well, it doesn't mean as much as people think.
From what I understand, he's still facing the gun charge that that's going to be resolved later.
And there's, you know, just because they've said it's not murder doesn't mean that they're saying that it's okay for him to have had the firearm in the first place.
So he's still facing those charges.
I understand that he's in custody.
We might see like a plea if he's been in custody a while.
He might he might have a bunch of time served lined up.
But Canadian law doesn't require that you be legally carrying a weapon in order to defend yourself with it.
They don't say, listen, you know, you're not legally carrying this gun, so your responsibility is to die if somebody attacks you with a knife.
They say, if you are in that sort of lethal threat scenario, you can use whatever you need to that's reasonable in self-defense.
And reasonable is going to depend on a whole bunch of things.
Like, you know, it may not be reasonable to defend yourself against a water gun with a real gun, but a knife is a lethal threat.
You know, if somebody's trying to stab you, that could very well kill you.
So, and people have sort of latched on to the Iraq aspect.
And I mean, on one end, you can say certainly things appear to have been dangerous if somebody's attacking this guy with a knife and he's got to defend himself.
And maybe he could have been killed if he wasn't.
But really, we don't know if the jury accepted that.
We don't know if the jury was like, oh, yes, it is dangerous like Iraq, or if the jury went, nah, we think that's that's no good because we don't actually get to find out what juries think in Canada.
We can't even, you know, even if you knew who the jury was, you couldn't pull one of them onto your show and say, hey, can you explain what the jury was thinking here?
Do you know, was this, you know, were you persuaded?
Were you not persuaded?
The other thing to remember is always that Canadian law has the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that's something a lot of people sort of find difficult to grasp because once in a self-defense case, once self-defense, there's an air of reality to it, that it's not sort of a ridiculous argument, the crown has to prove that it was not self-defense to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.
So the jury could still have been thinking this guy is probably the bad guy, you know, that this was probably bad self-defense, or even that it was very likely to be, you know, an improper killing.
But if they can only get to very likely, that's not good enough.
The standard is basically either certain or almost certain to us, like we sort of, if it's a legal error to give like a number to it, but typically in law school, they'll say like 90 to 95% certain kind of standards.
So if they're anything less than that, if they're only like 80% sure that this was improper, the shooting, then they have to acquit.
Yeah.
According to the Toronto Star report, the fellow was lunging at him with a knife.
He did have a knife.
It was uncertain what was in his pocket because it was sort of concealed.
And I mean, if he had been shot at before, I went to law school a long time ago, and I really never practiced criminal law other than when I was at the student legal clinic.
But if I remember it correctly, the law of self-defense is you shouldn't be weighed to a nicety, if I remember that phrase, as in, you know, a jury three years later, calmly, you know, oh, you weren't precise enough.
It wasn't perfect decision making.
And you correct me if my memory of law school 30 years ago was wrong, but a jury is not supposed to be demand perfection from someone who is in a crisis.
They're being attacked by someone with a knife.
Is he being 100% careful?
So I suppose that goes to your point also: you don't have to be perfect if you think your life's in danger.
And if that's reasonable, you can shoot back.
Absolutely correct.
And in fact, the line, I believe, is you don't have to weigh your behavior to a nicety in the face of an upraised knife.
So exactly this kind of scenario.
And one of the things that that intends to consider is that, you know, right now, sitting in a couch, you know, with a, you know, just in a, with lots of time to think about it, you can often say, well, what if you would have done something else?
Like, what if you could have done?
And it doesn't have to be the right answer or the perfect answer.
It just has to be a reasonable response.
That's the sort of standard that's built into the law is reasonability.
And sometimes reasonable can be a range of things.
You know, it might have been reasonable to run away, but it might have been reasonable not to run away, these kinds of issues.
So it's very much a don't sort of, you know, Sunday morning quarterback kind of thing.
You know, you mentioned a jury trial, and I don't think we have as many jury trials in Canada as they do in the States.
You would probably know the stats better than me.
And I can understand a jury might be more sympathetic because they might look on this, you know, he was 17 at the time.
They might have more sympathy, perhaps.
But one of the things is the jury does not write detailed, perfectly worded reasons.
And so in terms of a legal precedent, we don't actually know what the rationale was.
Like you say, was the jury impressed with this young man?
Were they on the edge?
We don't know.
And we just have to accept the jury.
And I think that, I think, by the way, I would trust a jury.
I mean, I would imagine there might be some extremely technical kinds of cases, a technical kind of fraud or something that a jury might not be equipped to handle.
But a schoolyard brawl, I can't think of anyone from any walk of life who wouldn't have some innate sense of that.
So in this case, it worked to the benefit of the accused, but we just can't apply this to other situations, right?
Because we don't know their thinking.
There's no precedent here.
Yes, absolutely.
We don't know what the jury was thinking.
They don't give reasons.
We can't even ask them reasons.
And sometimes their reasoning might be things like, we don't believe anybody.
If they don't believe anybody in this case, they would just have to acquit.
The other thing I sort of always caution, I get people who ask me about self-defense in hypotheticals all the time.
Like if somebody pulls a knife on me, what can I do?
And they can be very, very exact, like very fact-specific.
One little detail that changes between one case and the next can dramatically change the assessment.
And so it can be very dangerous to make big assumptions from one case that, like, okay, well, it's always going to be okay to shoot somebody if they pull a knife.
That, you know, it may usually be okay if they're trying to stab you to shoot them, but that's not always the case.
And so it's very difficult.
In general, the rule in Canada would be that if you've got any other option, you should be taking the other option other than using lethal force.
Lethal force really is always to be the last resort.
But that doesn't mean that everybody who uses lethal force will necessarily be convicted, is the other thing.
But going through the process is also itself difficult because I don't know how much this young man and his family will have spent.
I don't know if they got assistance with it or anything like that.
Charged with Self-Defense00:06:36
But a court case, especially one involving a murder, can be incredibly expensive.
Six figures would not be a difficult spend on something like that.
So if he had some legal aid, if his family sounds like they were refugees from Iraq, I mean, who knows?
Perhaps he was some of a wealthy merchant, but it doesn't sound that way.
So I guess one thing you've really helped me think through clearly is if the act of shooting a would-be knife killer was found defensible or he was acquitted of it, that doesn't mean he's off the hook.
As you say, he's still in jail.
So he is, it sounds like he's facing other firearms offenses, having the thing.
It was just the killing his assailant that was excused.
So even if this were a judge-written ruling, it might help us understand the law of defending yourself, but it wouldn't necessarily give any lenience to, well, how did you get the gun?
Who did you get the gun from?
Why were you carrying the gun?
And by the way, he got it from a friend.
I mean, it sounds like this was a terrible neighborhood.
Sounds like he's not too far from the truth when he describes it like Iraq.
I tell you one thing when I was growing up at my high school, there weren't people bringing knives and guns around.
That sounds like a pretty rough place.
Sounds like those things are still before the courts, perhaps, even if that one part of the story, the shooting, is now closed.
Absolutely.
And this is very common.
You'll see court cases where, for instance, a drug dealer was attacked by a rival drug dealer, and they have a gunfight.
The loser, of course, dies, but the winner ends up, they get cleared on the murder charges, but they still end up, you'll see like a sentence of three years or something like that because you had the gun, you were not allowed to have the gun.
So they end up doing some time over that.
But of course, the drug dealer is probably happier doing the three years than being the other guy in that gunfight.
So it also becomes a little difficult because if you don't have the firearm in a self-defense case, well, so I don't know that there's really a good answer here.
And unfortunately, we're just sort of, as a society, left to choose from a range of bad answers.
But that all the people who've said that, you know, he's getting away scot-free are probably wrong.
There's probably going to be some sentence for having the firearm itself.
Now, I know we don't have all the facts in front of us, but a few weeks ago, also in the Greater Toronto area, we heard of a fellow who, I think he had a Lamborghini parked out in front of his house and someone tried to steal it and he brought out a long arm.
And I'm just going from memory here.
And he was charged also, if I'm not mistaken.
I think police generally don't like it when a lawful firearm owner uses it for home defense.
It's very much a different approach than many parts of the United States.
I'm not saying all America is as pro self-defense as all of it.
There are some jurisdictions where it's a lot tougher to have a firearm.
But it seems to me like police and prosecutors in Canada want to stamp out any big ideas that ordinary citizens may have about using firearms or acquiring firearms for self-defense.
It's just a feeling I get.
What are your thoughts on that?
We've seen some actually really egregious examples of this.
The case of Ian Thompson, I don't know if that's one that you covered some years ago.
But people were firebombing his house.
He was a lawful gun owner.
He, in fact, was a firearm instructor, and he was able to get a revolver out of his storage.
He was able to load it.
He escaped the house and fired warning shots into the air, not even at anybody.
And initially, they charged him with respect to sort of the use of the firearm, but they dropped that and later pursued storage issues.
And their theory was basically: if you could get the gun out in time to not die in this attack, that clearly the gun must have been misstored.
And this is a bit of a concern.
I always tell people, like, if you end up defending yourself with a firearm, a lawfully owned firearm, you should expect to get charged.
And there's another case that didn't involve a firearm.
A woman was being attacked by her boyfriend and was nearly killed by him, but in the course of the struggle, managed to get a hold of a knife and stabbed him.
She was so badly injured that when she went to the neighbors, they thought it must be a Halloween costume because it was October and they just didn't think that there could be that much blood.
But she had killed him in defending herself.
And ultimately, they dropped the charges against her.
They said it was one of the clearest examples of a self-defense case, but she spent many months in jail because it was, you know, she's charged with a murder.
And these cases become very difficult because when they ultimately say that it's one of the clearest cases of self-defense and they drop the charges, they can't give her those months back.
So I would really like to see more discretion from prosecutors to say things like, well, you know, we can lay a murder charge anytime.
There's no limitation period that's going to stop them.
And maybe they could take a few minutes to say, hey, slow down.
Let's try to figure out could this be self-defense?
And if self-defense is sort of reasonably on the table to sit and have a real think about, you know, are we taking the side of the bad guys?
Are we causing more harm, perhaps, than is necessary?
And yeah.
I mean, there's one moment in policing, big city Canadian policing, that I just don't think I'll ever forget.
And that was about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, when the Toronto police were giving advice to people who were suffering from home invasion robberies where they had a nice car outside.
Concerns Over Rural Crime00:05:10
The thieves would bust into the house to get the key fobs to drive the car away.
It wasn't so much committing a crime in the house.
They just wanted the keys.
And the advice that the cops had was have your keys near the door so the home invaders don't have to go rummaging for it.
And it was said deadpan.
And I think that just sort of marked a kind of helplessness.
Like when I heard that, I heard, hey, guys, you're on your own.
By the way, you're on your own.
The only advice we have is to mitigate it.
Don't fight back.
Don't like there was no advice there on how to stop a crime or how to, it was how to make the crime less painful.
To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door.
Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car.
They don't want anything else.
A lot of them that they're arresting have guns on them and they're not toy guns.
They're real guns.
I'm worried, Ian, if we have the crime growth that I think we have, I was just looking the other day.
And in terms of certain violent crimes, Canada is now on par with the United States.
And I think this is a trend that's only happened in the last few years.
I think the Canadian identity was always, oh, we're not as violent as Americans, certainly not as gun-happy as Americans.
But I think we are being menaced by crime.
And I think if the police, if the best the police can do is tell you to think back and lie back and think of Queen Victoria as you're being robbed, I think you're going to see more vigilantism out of desperation, other than maybe the very wealthy who can afford to live in privately patrolled neighborhoods.
I think this has been an issue in rural Canada for a while too, where farmers have been protecting themselves against rural crime because cops are so far away.
I'm just worried that our identity of a safer place in the States is no longer accurate.
I think we're turning into an unsafe country, but ordinary citizens don't have the same Second Amendment rights as Americans do.
What do you think of that?
I think it is becoming concerning.
A lot of people are concerned.
I get more people who reach out to me asking, like, how do I get a gun?
And in a lot of cases, it's like, maybe the gun isn't your first answer, but like a better door and so forth.
But we're seeing a trend towards more brazen home invasions.
It used to be that whenever I saw a home invasion, my first thought was drugs.
It used to be that the people targeting, like being targeted, were almost exclusively, you know, involved in drug trafficking or owed a drug debt or something along those lines.
And there was some reason for that.
But now we're starting to see more that more of the home invasions, and I don't know if the number has gone up that much, but I'm seeing more of them targeted at just kind of the ordinary, ordinary citizen who had no reason to expect that their door would be being kicked down.
I was just reading a case not long ago where the homeowner said, thank God for that gun, because four people kicked down their door and they had, you know, the people invading had hammers, and it was her, her husband, and their 11-year-old.
Wow.
And the husband gets a legally owned shotgun, but he, because of the storage laws, he wasn't able to load it.
And thankfully, they didn't call his bluff because if they'd called his bluff, you know, they might have beaten him to death.
It might have been really bad.
But instead, they see the shotgun and they say, you know, check, please.
And they're out the door.
I'm concerned.
Rural Canadians have been sort of complaining about this for a long time, saying, listen, when we're in danger, that the police are too far away.
They're 45 minutes out.
And this was a big part of the urban-rural divide in Canada is that you had rural people saying, we need better protections, we need better self-help options.
And mostly urban Canadians, and especially urban Canadians from sort of wealthier, more privileged backgrounds who live in nicer, more secure neighborhoods were saying, well, just call the police.
And now we're seeing more of the people who were in neighborhoods they thought were nice are going, Maybe the police aren't going to be there if I need them.
And I don't know what the solution is, but we have a problem.
And certainly at least an optics problem.
And people deserve to feel safe.
It's very concerning.
And I guess I have to think on how to fix it.
But it is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed and needs to be fixed.
Ian Runkel Conversation00:01:12
Well, Ian, I've enjoyed our conversation so much.
We started off talking about that one case, but we covered a lot of ground.
I feel a lot smarter now than I did just 20 minutes ago.
I'm really grateful for your time.
I'd like to encourage my followers to follow you on YouTube at Runkle of the Bailey.
And do you have a Twitter account as well, an X account?
I have a Twitter account.
It's at Ian Runkel, I-A-N-R-U-N-K-L-E.
I think if you put in, like, just you search for Runkel of the Bailey, you'll get me on various platforms.
And I've really enjoyed our conversation.
So thank you so much for having me on.
Well, our great pleasure.
I really feel like you've given us a lot of really useful information.
Take care and keep fighting for justice.
Thank you.
You too.
There he is.
Ian Runkel of Runkle of the Bailey.
Very interesting conversation.
Well, I recorded today's show a little bit early because when I would normally be in the studio, I was out and about in Amish country.
I'll have an Amish update for you when I get back.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.