December 6th, 2009 | 
Author: On December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine stormed a classroom of Montreal’s École Polytechnique toting a semi-automatic rifle. After separating the men from the women, he declared his hate for feminists and opened fire on the women.
After 20 minutes, having killed 14 and wounding another 13, he turned the gun on himself.
20 years later, very little has changed. The federal government’s long-gun registry, set up in response to this horror is being dismantled. Programs to help women escape from abusive partners have been facing funding cuts for years. 29% of Canadian women surveyed still report having been physically assaulted by their male partners. In North America, women are 7 times as likely to experience intimate partner violence than men.1
We need to remember the horrors of life so that we can do something about them. If we forget, we risk repeating them. I hope the politicians and gun lobby are prepared for this to happen again.
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Sometimes you just feel like there is no punishment good enough for a dude like. Not even a hot waffle iron snapped onto his privates for the rest of eternity.
dude like that
I concur, Gary. A hot waffle iron sounds like a good plan.
On the gun issue, this is exactly why I’m a gun person (not for hunting). My Dad is a gun person, my husband is a gun person. When the tragedy happened at Virginia Tech, everyone was wondering why someone didn’t stop him. All it would have taken was one farm kid with a permit, one bullet, and maybe 35 innocent people wouldn’t have been brutally murdered… but laws prohibit guns on campuses, even if you have permit. Well, the bad guys aren’t following the laws, so maybe we should change them for sake of the good guys?
Sorry, Becky. But, that’s exactly the reason why I’m glad that we have something approaching reasonable restrictions on handguns. The last thing that would have helped would be 2 or 3 civilians who had never fired a weapon under pressure to be exchanging gunfire with someone who had nothing to lose.
BUT, (and we could debate this all day), with no one having a gun at VT or any other situation like it, the gunman has all the control and can kill people at will. If someone there (who has had training) had a concealed weapon, the murders could have stopped at a much lower number than 35. It doesn’t matter how many laws and restrictions you put on handguns, as my Dad says “The bad guys are never going to follow the rules”. A madman that wants to get a gun is going to get one…
You don’t need to arm the populace with percussive weapons to make the world a safer place, Becky Jo. What it takes is a mentality shift and bystanders who care enough to take a chance and get involved. It’s amazing how much of a difference you can make with words. If that doesn’t work, someone can knife the guy while I’m flapping my gums at him.