Part of me really feels for Julia Farquharson, Toronto anti-gun advocate. She lost one son in 2001, and now another has been arrested on - you guessed it - weapons charges. I'm sure that as a mother, it must be hard to watch your baby get carted away by police, no matter the crime. So I will acknowledge that she's gotten a bum deal. But to give too much sympathy is to play into her own victim mentality.

Farquharson says the drugs and guns might belong to one of her son's friends, or to one of the neighbourhood kids she's taken under her wing. She says she won't accept that the guns belonged to her son until she hears it proven in court.

While the ownership of the weapons is in question, what's clear is that Kadfi is a troubled young man. According to Farquharson, he's been depressed since his brother Segun was murdered in 2001. Kadfi was 18 at the time. Segun was beaten in the back of a car, then shot when he tried to escape. The sickening ordeal was recorded on Segun's cell phone. The murder is unsolved.

"He's been depressed because of the death of his brother and the fact that nothing's been done about it," his mother says. "He heard the sounds of his brother's murder."

There've been other problems. Kadfi told his mother that he'd recently been roughed up by someone who had a gun. Farquharson pleaded with Kadfi to tell her more about the harassment so that she could protect him, but he wouldn't elaborate. He didn't want the attention.

So the kid has been bullied. Fair enough. Let's say he carried a gun for protection, perhaps having no intention of using it ( a stretch of the imagination, to be sure, and still against the law). But the cocaine? Sorry, Julia, but that's gang behavior. Guns and drugs. Gang behavior.

"He thought he was going to die," Farquharson said. "He even wrote it down on paper. He cries all the time ... he says, `Mom, I don't feel like living.'"

"This is the country we're supposed to love so much?" she asked, crying. "This is what I get to be a citizen of this country? I tried to be good ... I'm here trying to end the violence that's destroying our lives, trying to do every that I can, and this is what I get in return? (The police) are doing their job, but do they have to do their job like this?"

Farquharson says that when her son is released, she's going to ask him some tough questions. In the meantime, she's holding public officials responsible for a greater crime: the inability to get guns off the streets.

"If there weren't guns on the street, there wouldn't be guns in my home," she says. "The system failed me and it failed my son. I'm angry at everybody who has the authority to stop gun violence and the proliferation of guns."

So your son isn't responsible because he's depressed? And the cops taking away a criminal (ostensibly the very point of your UMOVE campaign, by the way) is fine so long as the criminal in question isn't your son? And insult to injury - you blame Canada and the "system"?

I blame the kids with the guns, Julia. Whoever they might be.