A scene from the miniseries Guns shows officers of the Weapons Enforcement Unit, portrayed, from left, by actors Judah Katz, Lyric Bent and Shawn Doyle. A scene from the miniseries Guns shows officers of the Weapons Enforcement Unit, portrayed, from left, by actors Judah Katz, Lyric Bent and Shawn Doyle. (CBC)

The morbid thought that some of their daughters' friends and classmates might end up victims to increasing gun violence led husband-and-wife filmmakers David Sudz Sutherland and Jennifer Holness to create the dramatic new CBC-TV miniseries Guns.

TV and film director Sutherland (Love, Sex and Eating the Bones, Toronto Stories) says that gun violence has escalated to become a problem for Canadians everywhere, not simply relegated to "bad" areas.

At a recent event with the Toronto couple's five-year-old daughter, Sutherland recalled thinking "Which one of these five-year-olds will end up lying in an alley alone?" he told CBC Radio's Metro Morning on Thursday.

"You read the paper and you see these faces over and over again. These young men, invariably, they were all five years old at one time," he said.

Both director Sutherland and Holness, who produced the two-part, four-hour miniseries, recall how foreign and unusual gun violence was when they were growing up in Toronto just 20 years ago.

"I actually grew up in a sort of not-so-nice neighbourhood, as they say, but I had a great childhood. Part of that was because we could go out there and play. I don't trust that my children are actually safe out there ... if they’re not directly involved in things, they could just be innocent bystanders," Holness said.

"When I was a kid, [gun violence] just never happened," said Sutherland, who added that researching the drama proved eye-opening when he learned, for instance, that nowadays young people can rent guns for a weekend, like DVDs.

"That led us to the question: where are these guns coming from? So we wanted to do a story — a dramatic story, an exciting dramatic story — that explored these questions."

The miniseries, which features such Canadian stars as Colm Feore, Shawn Doyle and Elisha Cuthbert, attempts to explore the issue of illegal gun trafficking and the greater impact it has on entire communities and cities.

"It looks at the problem from different levels," Holness said, "the people who are actually bringing in the guns as well as the people who are impacted — just everyday people and people on the street."

Guns begins on CBC Television Sunday at 8 p.m., with the second part to follow Monday at 8 p.m.