Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Criminal lawyer weighs in on Toronto teen acquitted after self-defence shooting with illegal gun

00:00:00.000 Hello my friends. Crazy case out of Toronto. A teenager from Iraq uses an illegal gun 1.00

00:00:08.260 to kill someone and claims it's self-defense. I'll tell you what the jury said and what the

00:00:14.320 Toronto Star said. It's a feature interview with lawyer Ian Runkle. You don't want to miss this.

00:00:20.120 What an interesting story. But first let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel

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00:00:39.200 Tonight can you use an illegal gun to kill someone in self-defense? I'll tell you a story from Toronto

00:01:02.340 in the last crazy week. It's July 10th and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:10.100 Shame on you. You censorious bug.

00:01:22.200 I saw the most amazing story in the Toronto Star the other day. It was confusing for me and it was

00:01:27.740 confusing for the star. They didn't know quite what to make of it. Who was the good guy and who was the

00:01:32.960 bad guy because there was guns involved and they know one thing. They don't like that. Here let me

00:01:37.300 read a little bit to you from this story. It's just so astonishing. Jury, so there's a jury involved,

00:01:42.940 acquits teen who claimed self-defense in a fatal Toronto school shooting saying he carried the gun

00:01:51.840 because his neighborhood was like Iraq. Oh my god, there's so much to digest just in that 1.00

00:01:58.020 one headline. I'm gonna I'm gonna read just a sentence or two before I bring in a legal expert

00:02:02.620 to help me chew through this. A Toronto jury on Friday, so this was last week, acquitted a 20-year-old

00:02:10.280 man of second-degree murder accepting his claim that he fired four shots in self-defense, believing the

00:02:17.700 victim, 18-year-old Jefferson Guerrier, was lunging at him with a knife outside a high school in the city's

00:02:25.080 east end. Or as I would say, just another usual day in the failed state of Toronto. The fatal shooting

00:02:31.460 just as classes were ending for the day on Halloween in 2022 drew widespread attention due to the proximity

00:02:37.600 to students, one of whom filmed the incident on their cell phones. So yeah, like I say, just another normal

00:02:43.440 one. I'll just skip ahead. The man was 17 at the time. His identity is covered by a standard

00:02:50.240 publication ban. But what's so incredible to me is that he was packing an illegal gun

00:02:58.420 and he used it to shoot a guy he was afraid of and he was acquitted. Joining us now to talk about this

00:03:06.820 is Ian Runkle, a criminal lawyer who has a popular YouTube channel called Runkle of the Bailey Ealing.

00:03:13.480 Great to see you. There's so many more nuggets in that story that I'm tempted to read out, but I'd

00:03:18.940 rather have you describe it. This kid, he was 17 at the time, obviously he was a man, was a migrant from

00:03:26.160 Iraq. And he said that growing up in greater Toronto was as dangerous as Iraq. And I guess in

00:03:35.780 his defense, he says he had been shot at before. And it sounds like this school was almost a war zone

00:03:42.240 where, I mean, I don't know where my sympathies should lie. And I don't think the Toronto star

00:03:46.400 knows either because on the one hand, they hate guns, but they love migrants. They hate self-defense, 0.72

00:03:50.860 but they like this guy. My head's spinning. Help me out. One thing to remember is that self-defense

00:03:57.100 cases don't necessarily have a good guy or a bad guy. A lot of self-defense cases throughout the

00:04:03.460 Canadian case law are bad guy versus bad guy. So you can't necessarily assume that. And people have

00:04:11.880 sort of, they say, look, this guy's got an illegal gun. So what does this mean? Well,

00:04:19.660 it doesn't mean as much as people think. The, from what I understand, he's still facing the gun

00:04:25.460 charge that that's going to be resolved later. And there's, you know, just because they've said it's

00:04:30.960 not murder, doesn't mean that they're saying that it's okay for him to have had the firearm in the

00:04:36.960 first place. So he's still facing those charges. I understand that he's in custody. We might see like

00:04:44.360 a plea. If he's been in custody a while, he might, he might have a bunch of time served, uh, lined up,

00:04:50.300 but Canadian law doesn't require that you'd be legally carrying a weapon in order to defend

00:04:56.640 yourself with it. They don't say, listen, you know, you're not legally carrying this gun. So your

00:05:02.440 responsibility is to die. If somebody attacks you with a knife, they say, if you are in that sort of

00:05:09.120 lethal threat scenario, you can use whatever you need to, that's reasonable in self-defense and

00:05:16.880 reasonable is going to depend on a whole bunch of things. Like, you know, it may not be reasonable

00:05:22.040 to defend yourself against a water gun with a real gun, but a knife is a lethal threat. You know,

00:05:26.840 if somebody's trying to stab you, that could very well kill you. So, and people have sort of latched

00:05:33.700 on to the Iraq aspect. And I mean, on one end, you can say certainly things appear to have been

00:05:40.200 dangerous. If somebody is attacking this guy with a knife and he's got to defend himself and maybe he

00:05:45.500 could have been killed if he wasn't. But really, we don't know if the jury accepted that. We don't

00:05:51.720 know if the jury was like, oh yes, it is dangerous like Iraq. Or if the jury went, nah, we think that's, 0.98

00:05:57.940 that's no good. Cause we don't actually get to find out what juries think in Canada. We can't

00:06:03.600 even, you know, even if you knew who the jury was, you couldn't pull one of them onto your show and

00:06:09.840 say, hey, can you explain what the jury was thinking here? Do you know, was this, you know,

00:06:15.520 were you persuaded? Were you not persuaded? The other thing to remember is always that Canadian 1.00

00:06:21.420 law has the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's something a lot of people sort of

00:06:27.540 find difficult to grasp because once in a self-defense case, once self-defense, there's

00:06:34.200 an air of reality to it, that it's not sort of a ridiculous argument. The crown has to prove that

00:06:40.920 it was not self-defense to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. So the jury could still have been

00:06:46.640 thinking this guy is probably the bad guy, you know, that this was probably bad self-defense,

00:06:53.620 or even that it was very likely to be, you know, an improper killing. But if they can only get to

00:07:01.340 very likely, that's not good enough. The standard is basically either certain or almost certain to us,

00:07:10.360 like we sort of, if it's a legal error to give like a number to it, but typically in law school,

00:07:17.700 they'll say like 90 to 95% certain kind of standards. So if they're anything less than that,

00:07:24.640 if they're only like 80% sure that, you know, that this was improper, the shooting,

00:07:30.100 then they have to acquit. Yeah. According to the Toronto Star report, the fellow was lunging at him

00:07:36.840 with a knife. He did have a knife. It was uncertain what was in his pocket because it was sort of

00:07:41.340 concealed. And I mean, he had been shot at before. I went to law school a long time ago, and I really

00:07:48.500 never practiced criminal law other than when I was at the student legal clinic. But if I remember

00:07:53.820 correctly, the law of self-defense is you shouldn't be weighed to a nicety, if I remember that phrase,

00:08:01.180 as in, you know, jury three years later calmly, you know, oh, you weren't precise enough. It wasn't

00:08:09.720 perfect decision-making. If, and you correct me if my memory of law school 30 years ago was wrong,

00:08:15.000 but a jury is not supposed to be, demand perfection from someone who is in a crisis. They're being

00:08:21.920 attacked by someone with a knife. Is he being a hundred percent careful? So I suppose that goes

00:08:28.880 to your point also is you don't have to be perfect. If you think your life's in danger, and if that's

00:08:34.900 reasonable, you can shoot back. Absolutely correct. And they, in fact, the line I believe is you don't

00:08:41.620 have to weigh the, your behavior to a nicety in the face of an upraised knife. So exactly this kind

00:08:47.360 of scenario. And one of the things that that intends to consider is that, you know, right now sitting in

00:08:54.600 a couch, you know, with a, you know, just in a, with lots of time to think about it, you can often say,

00:09:01.720 well, what if you would have done something else? Like what if you could have done? And it doesn't

00:09:07.880 have to be the right answer or the perfect answer. It just has to be a reasonable response. That's the

00:09:16.160 sort of standard that's built into the law is reasonability. And sometimes reasonable can be

00:09:23.240 a range of things, you know, it might've been reasonable to run away, but it might've been

00:09:28.080 reasonable not to run away these kinds of issues. So it's very much a don't sort of, you know,

00:09:37.060 Sunday morning quarterback kind of thing. You know, you mentioned a jury trial and I don't think we

00:09:42.080 have as many jury trials in Canada as they do in the States. You would probably know the stats better

00:09:46.760 than me. And I can understand a jury might be more sympathetic because they might look on this,

00:09:54.300 you know, he was 17 at the time. They might have more sympathy perhaps. But one of the things is the

00:10:00.180 jury does not write detailed, perfectly worded reasons. And so in terms of a legal precedent,

00:10:07.260 we don't actually know what the, what the rationale was. Like you say, was the jury impressed with

00:10:13.500 this young man? Did he, were they on the edge? We don't know. And we just have to accept the jury.

00:10:19.760 And I think that, I think by the way, I would trust a jury. I mean, I would imagine there might be some

00:10:25.360 extremely technical kinds of cases, a technical kind of fraud or something that a jury might not

00:10:30.980 be equipped to handle, but a schoolyard brawl, I can't think of anyone from any walk of life who

00:10:36.280 wouldn't have some innate sense of that. So in this case, it worked to the benefit of the accused,

00:10:41.380 but we just can't apply this to other situations, right? Cause we don't know they're thinking,

00:10:46.600 there's no precedent here. Yes, absolutely. We don't know what the jury was thinking. They

00:10:52.200 don't give reasons. We can't even ask them reasons. And sometimes their reasoning might

00:10:57.580 be things like, we don't believe anybody. If, if they don't believe anybody in this case,

00:11:02.400 they would just have to acquit. The other thing I sort of always caution, I get people who ask me

00:11:08.380 about self-defense in hypotheticals all the time. Like if somebody pulls a knife on me,

00:11:12.960 what can I do? And they can be very, very exact, like very fact specific. One little detail that

00:11:21.300 changes between one case and the next can dramatically change the assessment. And so

00:11:27.980 it can be very dangerous to make big assumptions from one case that like, okay, well, it's always going

00:11:35.320 to be okay to shoot somebody if they pull a knife that, you know, it may usually be okay if they're

00:11:41.520 trying to stab you to shoot them, but that's not always the case. And so it's very difficult in

00:11:48.640 general. The rule in Canada would be that if you've got any other option, you should be taking the other

00:11:54.020 option other than using lethal force. Lethal force really is always to be the last resort, but that

00:12:01.240 doesn't mean that everybody who uses lethal force will necessarily be convicted is the other thing.

00:12:07.780 But, um, going through the process is also itself difficult because I don't know how much, you know,

00:12:15.320 this, uh, this young man and his family will have spent. I don't know if they got, um, you know,

00:12:20.380 assistance with it or anything like that, but a court case, especially one involving a murder

00:12:26.320 can be incredibly expensive. You know, six figures would not be, would not be a difficult spend

00:12:32.920 on something like that. And so if he had some legal aid, if his family sounds like they were

00:12:40.420 refugees from Iraq, uh, who knows, perhaps he was some wealthy merchant, but it doesn't sound that way.

00:12:46.860 So I guess one thing you've really helped me think through clearly is if the act of shooting

00:12:53.840 a would-be knife killer was found defensible or he was acquitted of it, that doesn't mean he's off

00:13:00.940 the hook. As you say, he's still in jail. So he is, it sounds like he's facing other firearms

00:13:07.380 offenses, having the thing. It was just the killing his assailant that was excused. So this, even if this

00:13:15.720 were a judge written ruling, it might help us understand the law of defending yourself, but it

00:13:22.920 wouldn't necessarily give any lenience to, well, how did you get the gun? Who did you get the gun

00:13:28.480 from? Why were you carrying the gun? And by the way, he got it from a friend where, I mean, it sounds

00:13:33.140 like this was a terrible neighborhood. It sounds like he, he's not too far from the truth when he

00:13:36.700 describes it like Iraq. I tell you one thing, when I was growing up at my high school, there weren't

00:13:41.540 people bringing knives and guns around. It sounds like a pretty rough place. It sounds like those

00:13:46.460 things are still before the courts, perhaps, even if that one part of the story, the shooting is now

00:13:52.940 closed. Absolutely. And this is very common. You'll see court cases where, for instance, a drug dealer

00:14:00.160 was attacked by a rival drug dealer and, you know, they have a gunfight. The loser, of course, dies,

00:14:07.160 but the winner ends up, you know, they get cleared on the murder charges or, but they still end

00:14:12.960 up, you know, you'll see like a sentence of three years or something like that because you

00:14:18.080 had the gun, you were not allowed to have the gun. So they end up doing some time over

00:14:23.080 that. But of course, the drug dealer is probably happier doing the three years than being the

00:14:28.360 other guy in that gunfight. So it, it also becomes a little difficult because if you don't

00:14:34.880 have the firearm in a self-defense case, well, so I don't know that there's really a good answer

00:14:43.840 here. And unfortunately we're just sort of as a society left to choose from a range of bad answers,

00:14:52.140 but that, um, all the people who've said that, you know, he's getting away scot-free are probably

00:14:58.040 wrong. There's probably going to be some sentence for having the firearm itself.

00:15:02.460 Now, I, I know we don't have all the facts in front of us, but a few weeks ago, also in the

00:15:07.400 greater Toronto area, we, we heard of a fella who, I think he had a Lamborghini parked out front of

00:15:12.580 his house and someone tried to steal it and, and he, he brought out a long arm and I'm just going

00:15:17.540 from memory here. And he was charged also, if I'm not mistaken. Um, I think police generally don't like

00:15:25.500 it when a lawful firearm owner uses it for home defense. It's very much a different approach than

00:15:32.280 many parts of the United States. I'm not saying all America is as pro self-defense as, as all of it.

00:15:39.180 I mean, there are some jurisdictions where it's a lot tougher to have a firearm, but, um, it seems to

00:15:45.580 me like police and prosecutors in Canada want to stamp out any big ideas that ordinary citizens may have

00:15:52.480 about using firearms or acquiring firearms for self-defense. It's just a feeling I get. Um, what

00:15:59.400 are your thoughts on that? We've seen some actually really egregious examples of this, uh, the case of

00:16:06.040 Ian Thompson. I don't know if that's a one that you covered, uh, some years ago, but, um, people were

00:16:12.640 firebombing his house. He was a lawful gun owner. He in fact was a firearm instructor and he was able to

00:16:21.340 get a revolver out of his storage. Uh, he was able to load it. He escaped the house and fired warning

00:16:28.260 shots into the air, not even at anybody. And initially they charged him with respect to sort

00:16:34.060 of the use of the firearm, but they dropped that and later pursued storage issues. And their theory

00:16:40.060 was basically, if you could get the gun out in time to not die in this attack, that clearly the gun must

00:16:47.740 have been, um, misstored. And this is a, this is a bit of a concern. I always tell people like,

00:16:55.660 if you end up defending yourself with a firearm, a lawfully owned firearm, you should expect to get

00:17:01.800 charged. And there's another case that didn't involve a firearm. A woman was being attacked by

00:17:08.700 her boyfriend and was nearly killed by him. But in the course of the struggle managed to get ahold of a

00:17:13.860 knife and stabbed him. She was so badly injured that when she went to the neighbors, they thought

00:17:20.100 it must be a Halloween costume because it was October and they just didn't think that there

00:17:25.860 could be that much blood. Uh, but she had killed him in defending herself and ultimately they dropped

00:17:33.900 the charges against her. They said it was one of the clearest examples of a self-defense case,

00:17:38.940 but she spent many months in jail, uh, because it was, you know, she's charged with a murder and

00:17:46.700 these cases become very difficult because when they ultimately say that it's one of the clearest

00:17:52.940 cases of self-defense and they dropped the charges, they can't give her those months back. 0.62

00:17:59.080 So I would really like to see more discretion from prosecutors to say things like, well,

00:18:04.440 you know, we can lay a murder charge anytime. There's no, there's no limitation period that's

00:18:11.280 going to stop them. And maybe they could take a few minutes to say, Hey, slow down. Let's try to

00:18:17.620 figure out, could this be self-defense? And if self-defense is sort of reasonably on the table

00:18:23.000 to sit and have a, a real think about, you know, are we taking the side of the bad guys? Are we

00:18:31.240 causing more harm perhaps than is necessary? And yeah.

00:18:39.300 I mean, I, there's one moment in policing, big city Canadian policing that I just don't think I'll

00:18:46.080 ever forget. And that was, uh, about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago when the Toronto

00:18:51.960 police were giving advice to people who were suffering from home invasion robberies, where

00:18:57.920 they had a nice car outside, the thieves would bust into the house to get the key fobs to drive the

00:19:03.720 car away. It wasn't so much committing a crime in the house. They just wanted the keys. And the advice

00:19:09.100 that the cops had was have your keys near the door. So the home invaders don't have to go rummaging

00:19:14.900 for it. And it was said deadpan. And I think that just sort of marked a kind of helplessness. Like

00:19:22.100 when I heard that, I heard, Hey guys, you're on your own, by the way, you're on your own. The only

00:19:27.200 advice we have is to mitigate it. Uh, don't fight back. Don't like, there was no, there was no advice

00:19:33.720 there on how to stop a crime or how to, uh, it was how to make the crime less painful.

00:19:39.920 To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door

00:19:45.480 because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else. A lot of

00:19:49.920 them that they're arresting have guns on them and they're not toy guns. They're real guns.

00:19:53.940 I'm worried. Ian, if we, if we have the crime growth that I think we have, I was just looking

00:20:02.600 the other day and in terms of certain violent crimes, Canada is now on par with the United

00:20:07.500 States. And I think this is a trend that's only happened in the last few years. I think

00:20:12.580 the Canadian identity was always, Oh, we're not as violent as Americans, certainly not, um,

00:20:17.860 as gun happy as Americans. But I think we are being menaced by crime. And I think if the police,

00:20:24.820 if the best the police can do is, uh, tell you to, to think back and lie back and think of Queen

00:20:30.960 Victoria as you're being robbed. I think you're going to see more of a vigilantism out of desperation,

00:20:35.880 other than maybe the very wealthy who can afford to live in privately patrolled neighborhoods.

00:20:40.660 I, I think this has been an issue in rural Canada for a while too, where farmers have been protecting

00:20:47.220 themselves against rural crime because cops are so far away. Um, I'm just worried that our identity

00:20:53.180 of a safer place in the States is no longer accurate. I think, I think we're turning into

00:21:01.200 an unsafe country, but ordinary citizens don't have the same second amendment rights as Americans do. 0.99

00:21:07.920 What do you think of that? I think, uh, it's, it is becoming concerning. A lot of people are,

00:21:14.040 are concerned. I get more people who reach out to me asking like, how do I get a gun? And in a lot of

00:21:21.000 cases, it's like, maybe the gun isn't your first answer, but like a better door and so forth. But

00:21:27.820 we're seeing a trend towards more brazen home invasions. It used to be that whenever I saw a home

00:21:34.200 invasion, my first thought was drugs. Uh, it, it used to be that the people targeting like being

00:21:41.220 targeted were almost exclusively, uh, you know, involved in drug trafficking or owed a drug debt

00:21:47.800 or something along those lines. And there was some reason for that, but now we're starting to see

00:21:53.560 more that more of the home invasions. I don't know if the number has gone up, uh, that much,

00:21:59.620 but I'm seeing more of them targeted at just kind of the ordinary, ordinary citizen who had no reason

00:22:06.000 to expect that their door would be being kicked down. I was just reading a case not long ago where

00:22:12.620 the, uh, the homeowner said, thank God for that gun because four people kicked down in their door and

00:22:19.480 they had, you know, the, the people invading had hammers and it was her, her husband and their 11 year

00:22:26.320 old and the husband gets a legally owned shotgun, but he, because of the storage laws, he wasn't able 0.84

00:22:35.200 to load it. And thankfully they didn't call his bluff because if they'd called his bluff, you know,

00:22:41.060 they might've beaten him to death. It might've been really bad, but instead they see the shotgun and they

00:22:46.360 say, uh, you know, check, please. And they're out the door. I I'm concerned, uh, rural Canadians have 1.00

00:22:54.520 been sort of complaining about this for a long time saying, listen, when we're in danger, that the

00:23:00.740 police are too far away, they're 45 minutes out. And this was a big part of the urban rural divide in

00:23:07.140 Canada is that you had rural people saying, we need better protections. We need better self-help

00:23:12.820 options and mostly urban Canadians and especially urban Canadians from sort of wealthier, you know,

00:23:20.800 more privileged backgrounds who live in nicer, more secure neighborhoods. We're saying, well,

00:23:25.780 just call the police. And now we're seeing more of the people who were in neighborhoods they thought

00:23:32.860 were nicer going, um, maybe the police aren't going to be, uh, aren't going to be there if I, if I need

00:23:40.260 them. And I don't know what the solution is, but we have a problem. And I certainly at least an optics

00:23:49.680 problem and people deserve to feel safe. It's, it's, it's very concerning. And I, I guess I'll, I have to

00:24:01.380 think on how to, how to fix it, but it's, um, it is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed and

00:24:07.200 needs to be, uh, needs to be fixed. Well, you know, I've enjoyed our conversation so much. We started off

00:24:12.740 talking about that one case, but we covered a lot of ground. I feel a lot smarter now than I did just 20

00:24:18.380 minutes ago. I'm really grateful for your time. I'd like to encourage my followers to follow you

00:24:23.020 on YouTube at Runkle of the Bailey. And do you have a Twitter account as well? An X account?

00:24:29.080 I have a Twitter account. It's, uh, at Ian Runkle, I A N R U N K L E. Um, I think if you put in,

00:24:36.700 like, just do search for Runkle of the Bailey, you'll get me on various platforms. And, uh,

00:24:42.900 I've really enjoyed our conversation. So thank you so much for having me on.

00:24:46.180 Well, our great pleasure. I really feel like you've given us a lot of

00:24:49.060 really useful information. Take care and, uh, keep fighting for justice.

00:24:53.380 Thank you. You do.

00:24:54.460 There he is. Ian Runkle of Runkle of the Bailey. Very interesting conversation.

00:25:03.020 Well, I recorded today's show a little bit early because when I would normally be in the studio,

00:25:08.020 I was out and about in Amish country, I'll have an Amish update for you when I get back until next

00:25:16.980 time on behalf of all of us at rebel world headquarters to you at home. Good night. Keep

00:25:22.640 fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - July 11, 2025

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Criminal lawyer weighs in on Toronto teen acquitted after self-defence shooting with illegal gun

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