Remembering the Canadian School Massacre

[Guest]

The killings in Virginia were obviously perped by a really disturbed Korean dude. But the US is not immune to gun violence. A horrible mass-murder happened in Canada at a University in 1989. Mark Steyn's take is below:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the €œMontreal massacre,€ the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you€™d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate €” an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The €œmen€ stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

[stogie bear]

I must be part Canadian... I tend to do what lunatic gunmen tell me to do, too.

[andre459]

How many more shootings like the recent one at Virigina Tech do there have to be before the US consider gun control. I know it doesn't get rid of the wackos but it makes it a hell of a lot harder for them to kill people.

Maybe the religious groups should stop worrying about music, movies and porn and start taking the guns away.

[Skinhound]

Tend to agree with Stogie...standing up to a madman with a gun is an act of stupidity...not an act of maleness.

If you want to get a proper sense of Canadian maleness, try watching an NHL hockey game.

As a Canadian I find your remark baseless, not to mention offensive.

[stogie bear]

Gun control in the US is not an option. It's part of their outdated constitution to supposedly protect them from the state itself!

Besides, even if you manage to have gun control laws, only the law abiding citizens will comply with the rules and will be then defenceless against criminals who are armed.

For America, guns are there to stay. So it's up to people and places to ban them. Schools and colleges are useless when it comes to security and are fantastic easy targets for nutters.

Unfortunately, although the US is pretty strong on gun crimes they are nowhere near strong enough and there's no deterrent for a crack head to pass by a nice easy Stop'n'Go for his next fix...

the real answer is to get rich and live inside enclosed communities and let the crappy poor people just fight it out amongst themselves.

[rob69in]

Gun control in the US is not likely to make a shred of difference to gun crime, in fact it may even increase.

After an incident in the UK where some nut case opened up on some school kids the British government had an ill thought out, knee jerk reaction which cost the British tax payer several billion, yes billion, to impliment & pay out in compensation as the government of the day had absolutely no idea what it was doing & refused to listen to anyone. It took over 7yrs to finally rap up & the costs were desperately hidden in an attempt to try & disguise the total farce they had made of it. Peoples hobbies were wrecked who enjoyed practical pistol shoots & many gun clubs / small ranges closed, not to mention gun smiths / shops. Unfortunately as the police pointed out it wasn't these people commiting the offences, criminals don't buy guns from bonified dealers or join gun clubs. Another classic example of the sheer incompitence of government in the UK & it cost the tax payer dearly.

The actual end result of this costly farce, gun crime has gone up in the UK. It never actually seems to occur to the idiots in power that criminals do not follow the rules, they don't go to the local gun shop with there licience & buy & register the guns they are going to commit crimes with. It actually did them a favour as they are now well aware there are far less guns around!  The same mistake was made of knife crime. Knife amnesties will have zero effect on knife crime. There have been two in the UK, & knife crime has increased. It seems the successive UK governments are simply incapable of learning anything.

Criminals / nutcases will do whatever they want, when they want, because they are generally not law abiding people in the first place, so any old / new / present legislation is of no consequence to them.

[harley quinn]

The more I read of his posts, the more I feel that Rob and I must be bloody related. The Dunblane massacre which started this whole gunlaw thing in Britain was perpetrated by a mentally ill person who had been allowed to hold guns at home. It was not the law abiding target shooters that caused this situation but the shiftless bastards in the local police who could not be bothered to carry out the standard checks on a very disturbed individual and stop him from having firearms.

One of the problems that we have in western society IMHO is recognising that severely mentally ill people should not have the same rights us the rest of us. If a person has a highly contagious disease they are quarantined - quite rightly- until they infection is dealt with. Someone with severe mental problems however can be let to wander about in a society that despite official denial is awash in guns, mostly from Eastern Europe.

I'm not suggesting that we bang mentally ill people up in a dungeon, just recognise that they are a danger to themselves and others and act before there is a another disaster.

[Tomcat]

The Ecole Poly

The point of Sangas clipping was one of cowardice?.
If Steyn himself was put in that situation maybe we would see the shit running down his legs. A real moral maze that one...unless your in the situation its hard to visualise the terror....

However i can see where Steyn is coming from......

[rob69in]

Unfortunately since Maggie Thatcher ( whether you liked her or not ) there has not been strong leadership / government of this country, ( UK ). In fact, Labour are weak beyond belief & are so far adrift of what the people want its staggering, but then again they have utter contempt for the vast majority of the population.

They are far too easily swayed by minority do-gooder groups & the resulting policy is hap hazard, ill conceived & structured to make them look good & try to get decent media coverage, rather than any tangible well thought out policy / legislation to address the relevant problems. On top of that comes the idiotic political correctness & the seemingly endless obssession with not upsetting tho's who are least intergrated & contributing to our society. End result, farce & cost to the generally law abidding tax payer, who has become a 3rd class citizen in his own country.

[kahuna]

(kahuna @ Apr. 20 2007,21:41)

(Tomcat @ Apr. 20 2007,20:49) A real moral maze that one...unless your in the situation its hard to visualise the terror....

How true...we would all like to think that we would be the hero...

In truth, most of us are simply heroic myths in our own minds...

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous€”
Almost, at times, the Fool." T.S.E.

[rob69in]

(kahuna @ Apr. 20 2007,21:41)

(Tomcat @ Apr. 20 2007,20:49) A real moral maze that one...unless your in the situation its hard to visualise the terror....

How true...I'm sure we would all like to think that we would be the hero...

In truth, most of us are simply heroic myths in our own minds...

Very true, despite my military training, when the shells started raining into the town we were in, about 3000 over a 3 month period. While in the collective shelters taking the nominal role & checking on personal, i was hardly able to write I was shaking so much. But as the weeks wore on it had less & less effect. I am sure the "hero's" immerge when the situation requires it, but I don't think anyone knows what they would do untill the time arrives.

[stogie bear]

While the liberal fools are busy handing out human rights to the less deserving of them, then the law abiding citizens will have to suffer the consequences of it with their blood.

Throught the history of mankind there has never been a better time or place than to be a criminal, right now in the West.

[Guest]

(Skinhound @ Apr. 20 2007,15:36) As a Canadian I find your remark baseless, not to mention offensive.

This is obviously a difficult time. Trying to remember someone else's tragedy may actually be one of healing, not malice, by recognizing the commonalities we share and the magnitude of a problem not limited to any single country.

The problem of crazies with guns is worldwide: within about the last 15 years or so, there has been Dunblane, Scotland (16 dead), Concordia University, Montreal (4 dead), Dawson College, Montreal (1 dead and 20 injured), Erfurt, Germany (17 dead), Port Arthur, Tasmania (36 dead), Beslan, Russia (344 dead), and the list could go on and on, especially as it impacts the Muslim world.

Also, please don't ever own a gun, because you seem to be the type of person who shoots from the hip. May I suggest you re-read the original post. Then you might recognize that it was not my remark, as you wrote. Those are the words of Mark Steyn, a Canadian columnist whose writing is syndicated throughout the English speaking world.

[kahuna]

(stogie bear @ Apr. 20 2007,21:56) Throught the history of mankind there has never been a better time or place than to be a criminal, right now in the West.

You got that right...and most of them don't even use guns...their called politicians...

[harley quinn]

You never said a truer word.

In London at the moment you can't get near a government building for concrete barricades and security guards. Apparantly guns are OK to guard their worthless backsides

The rest of us of course just take our chances in a situation not of our making.