Montreal's Columbine
 

So some random "punk" in a trenchcoat shot up a bunch of people at the Dawson College CEGEP today. The police perimeter is HUGE. They even shut down a large portion of the Metro (subway). The gunman was killed by the police and reports say that a 20 year old girl was shot in the head and died of her injuries in the hospital. I luckily don't know anybody that attended the school.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/natio...ts-dawson.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5343714.stm

Just heard about it on the news. :(

Bet you 10 bux it takes a day for someone to jump on it and blame video games.

Actually, scratch that. I'm sure the media, somewhere, already has.

This is the first Ive seen of it. Very tragic anytime something like this happens.

They've just confirmed the death of the girl. Some guy called his mother and said "Mom, I think I'm going to die. I was shot in the chest." This sucks.

Too true, but sadly it seems just saying the person was unstable doesn't make for good media sensationalism!

I was very suprised when I learned this was in Canada, it may have been just Micheal Moores rambling but I was under the impression the country had next-to-no gun crimes.

We do have very few gun crimes, especially in Montreal. I can't remember the last time that I heard about a shooting in the city. The last murder that I remember was some dude stabbing his father a few weeks ago.

Isnt the "whoa is me, they're blaming the media," discussion a little overdone by now.

We know theyre gonna blame violent videogames, metal music, adult swim television programming, and completely overlook the bad parenting and mental state of the kid doing the shooting.

What if the kid was infulenced by these things? What if he wasnt? Who cares. This discussion has been dragged through the dirt countless times. The only difference is that it happened in Canada this time.

Ill never understand why people get so bent out of shape because a bunch of politicians wanna have a hissy fit over what our kids have access to in the media.

So your precious little videogames are being mistaken for murder simulators. Its not like there gonna take them away from us. If your able to purchase these games then your already an adult. That means your still gonna be able to get them irregardless of what they say about them.

Dude... I just saw that on BBC. This is...

Oh well. My condolances go out to the victim's family and fully await as the media turns this into a blame war.

It is always rough to have a shooting, and the worst are always where violence is so minimal and unheard of.

I remember at my high school, around 95', a freshmen shot another freshmen over something obscenely stupid. The freshmen who pulled the trigger immediately had the shit beat out of him, and his gun removed from him, but the victim died.

In 94', again at my high school, there was this senior known as White Seed. He took a machette to a dude's head, and cut two others in the chest. Like the freshmen, he also had the shit kicked out of him pretty fast.

You never really get used to this type of violence. It's always a sad tragedy.

About the whole 'blaming' issue, the media, in Quebec at least, isn't as convulated or trigger-happy as in the United States. Close, but not yet.

Maybe now Harper, Bush's little puppet, will look at the whole gun law he screwed up when he came into office and finally change it.

Ya... I don't think the Quebec media cares too much about blaming videogames or what not. I doubt Quebecers care too much about the incident either.

Well, this certainly sucks. I'm glad the police response in Montreal was alot better than the Jefferson County guys during Columbine. So was the gunman a former student or just a crazy sick fuck?

We don't know anything about the gunman other than what I wrote. There may have been more than one shooter.

I've heard of it a bit earlier; just after I came back from school, I got a call from my father and eventually he told me about this. I didn't know someone has been killed though.

I'm not sure if I'm glad or not the shooter's been killed, though. On one hand, he died, and knowing our legal system he might not have gotten life imprisonment, but on the other hand, I really don't feel a death like this one is "right".

The police were just doing their job. To be honest, I would have preferred it if he had not been killed. That way he could have been sent to prison and suffered for the rest of his life. I have no sympathy at all for fuckers like that.

Yeah, well, that's essentially my opinion too, but as I've said, him spending the rest of his life in jail wouldn't have necessarily happened.

Oh boy, you can be sure when I heard about this, I had to know who got shot, I know a bunch of people who go to Dawson.. A friend of mine was shot today, called their family, found out. He'll make it, but I can be sure it was a very rough experience.. Right here too. Really sucks. Not much else to say, the news is just repeating the same info cause no new details sprung up.

Shit. You doing ok Turbo?

Yeah. She's fine so I should really stop worrying... but its hard. You read all this shit on the news, but you dont expect it to happen.. especialy not HERE... but I s'pose theres morons in every part of the world.

It's rare, which is why it makes the news like this when it DOES happen.

Though lest we forget, Montréal is already the site of what is probably Canada's most infamous shooting rampage, when 14 female students were murdered at École Polytechnique in 1989. That was my first thought when I heard about this shooting; "Shit, is some fuckwit doing a replay of the Montréal Massacre?" Time will tell what his (possibly their?) motives were, I guess.

Or not Amanda. The shooter is kind of dead. . .

Uh, you do realise that spree killers leave behind friends, family, suicide notes, websites, and plenty of other things for the police to piece together their motives, right? This guy didn't just walk out of a magic portal and start shooting people. He had a history, he had family and friends, he had a life, and if he's anything like the typical spree killer, they're going to find more than enough hints there about what drove him to this.

Unless he left a note explaining why, all we can do is speculate based on what people that knew him say.

School shooters usually do leave journals, hints, or paper trails a mile long as to their motives. When in that state of mind, I'd be suprised if he was careful enough to not spill everything at somepoint. People simply weren't smart enough to piece together the clues beforehand.

Kind of off topic, I'm always amazed at the photography work in non-American media. The picture in the CBC link actually shows a dead body with blood. Which reminds me of a BBC story about a random axe murder in the street that showed the victim in a pool of blood. Not that I'm offended or anything, it just amazes me how conservative and easily offended my society is.

Welcome to Quebec. R rated movies don't exist here.

actually, RDI (a cheap french CNN) was playing this morning a megadeth music video which, apparently, gill was listening to...

And of course, separatists can't help their sadistic opportunism (or whatever the real word). Gilles Duceppe was talking on RDI about violence on TV and on how it might have influence the killer. Daniel Turp (PQ MNA) "subtely" talked about the gun registry program. Talk about a total lack of respect:eyebrow:

Apparantly the shooter frequented vampirefreaks.com, and his profile there showed pictures of him holding automatic rifles, along with lots of self-promotion as some Angle of Death....
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/natio...-shooting.html

They are so going to blame this on heavy metal and goth culture after this.... -_-

Its a shock for me too as a Montreal resident. Just found out about it a few minutes ago as I'm kinda out of the country... I agree the with the sentiment that Montreal has always been a relatively peaceful and nonviolent city in Canada.

Sad news indeed. I'm pretty far away from Montreal, living in Winnipeg, and i've never actually been past Toronoto. Other than the 1989 shooting, i can't recall ever hearing about a Canadian school shooting before this.

This incident is a great example for media inaccuracy, especially for early reporting. On various sources, there were 1 dead, 4 dead, 0 dead; one shooter, 3 or 4 shooters; 12 injured, 19 injured, 20 injured; gunman was shot down by police, gunman shot himself; he used an AK-47, Ruger 10/22, various guns. Gunman listened to "Megadeath" (sic), played "first-person shooter game Postal (sic)", listened to "death metal" or "black metal" (yeah, right). I love journalists who write about things they don't know anything about.

Well, in this case, it was a 25 year old man. Sure, when you look at his VampireFreaks profile, he acted like a dumb angsty teenager, but at his age we're way past blaming the parents, haha.
Not every shithead in the world had bad parents. Some people are gonna end up as shitheads no matter what, it seems. This guy was a loser. He couldn't even get murder "right", he only managed to kill one person (I mean, that's a good thing, but it's kind of pathetic).

Well, we have 18+ movies, but with very very few exceptions (the only one that come to my mind at the moment is Natural Born Killers) they're all for adult movies. Hell, I bought the Rome DVD boxset recently and it was rated R for US, 17+ (I think) for Canada, and 14+ for Québec. :)

^ I realize that. I was just saying that parents aren't always to blame, and that ultimately, the responsibility is his. Especially at this age. If he were 15, it'd be something else. But a lot of people suffer through endless abuse and manage to become decent people still, especially when they get older and mature on their own. That guy obviously didn't, regardless of whether or not his parents sucked (no evidence of either at the moment).

When I first heard about it, I was at my college (cegep). A few minutes after the incident happened, there was a big crowd in front of the TV near the library. Everybody wanted to get the latest news. I was totally shocked to learn that such a tragedy could happen again in Montreal. Today, the local newspaper reporters came to my cegep to do a survey and asked the students if they were scared to go to Montreal again. Why should we be afraid? I mean, something like that could happen anytime and anywhere, not just in Montreal. We can't foresee anything.

Among those 14 victims, there was Annie Turcotte, a student who graduated at my former private high school in 1987. The teachers who knew her as a student told us how dynamic, intelligent and determinate she was. The high school gym is named after her because she was also sporty. She was destined to a brilliant future, but some freak took her life.

Tragedy. It's somewhat fortunate in the midst of all the chaos that it did not escalate into something even more terrific, especially in terms of death count. It's always shocking to hear about gun violence in Canada. I thought that couple of murders in Hamilton and randomly vicious brutality in the same week of the newspaper was bad here, but it looks like there are worse things in other places too.

Apparently a friend of mine was working in the ICU at the Montreal General at the time. She's doing her last week there in her last year of med school. Things didn't go well. :(

Also, Morrigan, why are you complaining about the media inacuracy? They were getting their reports from terrified students that had basically no idea what was happening.

And we come full circle. Again. Media will play the violent videogames card and gamers will raise them a blame the parents. Ad nauseam. Irony always manages to be ever so sweet.

media: GTA is the reason the killer did this.
gamer: WTF it's not games, it's clearly the parents fault!

Incidentally, neither group has any idea as to what they are talking about.

So then who's fault is it?

I would've thought it was obvious that perhaps its the fault of the person who picked up the damn gun and shot up a school? Say what you will, but I think you can only shift blame so far before you realise that this person was unstable and it was their friggin fault.

We'll watch the media pick at this like vultures with a carrion but its obvious there can be no other party to blame here

My newspaper blamed Vampirefreaks, a columbine RPG, and they managed to work in a quote of his that blamed video games: "live is like a video game, everyone's got to die sometime." *rolls eyes*

Well, I meant besides the fact that cocksucking pussy faggot who took the lives of others. There are other factors which could have contributed to his actions.

I honestly think this guy was no victim of bullying. He looks like a bully himself. Shit, I'm sure if he went to my old high school, people would stay the fuck away from him. I know there were guys like him who picked fights with others.

It's really sad what happened. But I think that everyone just saying that they feel sorry for the victims, isn't really doing anything.

The Quebec government should increase gun laws and security at schools. I know alot of residents in Montreal and Quebec City with access to fire-arms. If not personally, them gloating about it on the net. This is also the third time a school shooting has happened in Quebec, do we really want to see history repeat itself again? They've got to do something more than just consoling people.

Look, I don't want to turn this into some sort of gun control debate, but if you actually ban guns, without even looking at the actual effectiveness of such a measure (which could be debated for weeks), you're mostly attacking the symptoms, not the cause of the problem. In my opinion, no matter the issue at hand, that's never the right thing.

As for increased security, what exactly do you want them to do?

There's always going to be crazy motherfuckers who go nuts and try to kill a bunch of people. That's pretty much a fact of life, in this day and age. The only thing you can do is hope for the best, really. And gun control laws won't help, because if they want to get a gun, they'll find a way. Drugs are outlawed, remember? How much has that helped to keep them off the streets?

To add to Capo, Guns are outlawed in Washington DC, and it has the highest murder rates in the country. Gun control laws don't help.

indeed. gill's weapons were perfectly legal AND he had registered in the national gun registry program. Here goes the argument for it:doh: