Venturing into one of Toronto's most crime-ridden neighbourhoods yesterday, Paul Martin took awkward pains to describe a pair of young activists he'd placed on display during a media event as "articulate."

That the remark came across as more than a bit patronizing was probably inadvertent. But unfortunately, the PM's word choice was symptomatic of both the event and the proposed handgun ban he was there to unveil.

It wasn't just the young men paraded out yesterday who were props for Mr. Martin. It was the entire neighbourhood, and others like it, that have lost an alarming number of victims this year to gun violence. Because however close he may have been to the corner of Jane-Finch for an hour or two, it was really about wooing voters in neighbourhoods the PM is much more comfortable in.

Making the streets safer for the folks who live in Jane-Finch or Rexdale or the pockets of Scarborough worst hit by Toronto's mounting gang violence isn't something that'll be achieved with grandiose, sweeping gestures.

It will instead require a comprehensive set of policies - from community policing and tougher sentencing to community investment and a more intelligent approach to social housing -- that will take years to have a full impact.

But Mr. Martin doesn't have years. He has 45 days to save his government. To do that, he needs to energize his base -- voters generally inclined to mark an X next to the Liberal candidate, but so uninspired with the party these days that they might look elsewhere or, more likely, just stay home on election day.

That base is not made up of people who live in neighbourhoods like Jane-Finch, where voter turnout is consistently low. It instead consists largely, in the Greater Toronto Area at least, of the relatively affluent residents of Leaside or North Toronto or the Annex, and middle-class suburbanites living in Brampton or Mississauga or Ajax.

Those voters, for the most part, have little exposure to serious crime themselves. Most areas of Toronto are as safe, or safer, than they were a decade ago. But with all those reports of drive-by shootings and revenge killings at funerals, they're fretting about what's happening to their city, and have become the noisiest advocates of government intervention.

When you're not really at any signficant risk, the mere appearance of action will often suffice. And banning handguns fits the bill perfectly: the grandest gesture of all, and one that appeals insitinctively to liberal sensibilities to boot.

In fact, the Liberals are no doubt counting on that appeal extending well beyond Toronto. Now that the gay marriage debate is all but over, the challenge for Mr. Martin's visionless party is to find ways to prove itself significantly more progressive than Stephen Harper's. And so, just as they did with the gun registry last decade, the Liberals have fallen back on a lazy, all-sizzle-and-no-steak brand of liberalism designed to win headlines rather than achieve results.

The problem with the gun ban is not, as some critics have charged, that it's another expensive boondoggle waiting to happen. The problem is that it's a big nothing. As the Conservatives were quick to point out yesterday, handguns are already more or less banned in Canada. And considering the number of illegal guns flowing over the border, even putting a stop to the theft of the small number of legal ones isn't going to stop criminals from getting them into their hands.

If the ban were a small component of a broader strategy, that would be one thing. But despite some other, more worthwhile promises lumped in with it yesterday, it's clearly the Liberals' new signature crime-prevention policy. And it's what they'll no doubt be talking about every time Mr. Martin visits a major urban centre.

Now and then, the PM might even drag out a few more residents of hard-hit neighbourhoods to stand beside him and look duly appreciative. And if he's lucky, the voters he's targeting will find them as cute as the kindergarten kids he was using as props the day before.