Three times in 17 years.
I can remember back to December 6 1989.. sitting in my dorm apartment in CEGEP watching Les Canadiens when it cut to live news of the shootings. Fourteen dead women, shot by Mark Lépine. My roomate and I sat there, shocked, tears forming in our eyes.
August 24 1992. I am now a student at Concordia. I can’t enter the Hall building. There, Valery Fabrikant goes on a rampage and kills 4 of his colleagues.
Fast forward 17 years later and this time I am notified by emails.. “shootings at Dawson” and it all came back to me so very quickly. Those same gut wrenching feelings. The anger towards the shooter. The utter shock and sadness towards the victims.
What started after the slayings at L’École Polytechnique was a discussion about hatred towards women, about misogyny. I like to think some of us younger males changed our attitude towards women after that. It’s the one event that marks me every year. December sixth is the day 14 of my peers died. It must never happen again.
Yesterday, sitting in my office and the emails start to arrive.
Something needs to come of this. Something needs to change. As the days follow, we will learn more about what caused Kimveer Gill to go on a shooting spree. We will learn more and more about him.
What however needs to take place is a reinforcement of our gun laws. The gun registration program came from December 6th 1989. It’s since been put on hold after Harper came to power. He will have some nerve trying to finally end this program.
The program won’t necessarily stop people like Lépine, Fabrikant and Gill from going on rampages. That, we have to do as a society. Until such time, we need to make guns as difficult to purchase as possible, be it on the black market or legally.
The idea of the gun registration is simple. If you own a thing in which its sole purpose is to kill, the government needs to know about it.
I really don’t think that’s too much to ask for.
Related posts:
You acknowledge that such laws wouldn’t stop murderous rampages by committed killers like this guy, but decide it would nonetheless be good to further inconvenience law-abiding gun owners. Brilliant. Society can’t STOP murder nor stop people from feeling hopeless, sad and hateful. There’s a fairly strong body of evidence (i.e., all of human history) to suggest that people occasionally kill each other. Mourn, punish, take sane preventative measures, and move on. It’s sad, but it’s no “wake up” call to the need for evermore restrictions on inanimate objects.
*Applause*
Well said.
To SS, I wonder, is it better to make it a longer and tighter process to legally own a gun even if it inconveniences law-abiding citizens or is it better to stay relaxed and hope it’s not your kid who gets shot next?
Mr Anonymous’s argument is a straw man argument. It’s been used over and over again.
No one ever claimed a gun registry would stop murderes. It was never claimed as much.
You own a car, register it.
You own something that is designed to kill people. register it.
We’re too close to the border of a country where buying a gun is very simple to make a gun registration work. And bringing it into Canada it is not exactly hard.
But these incidents can’t be prevented by gun laws, they can *maybe* prevented by better education and better parenting. This guy apparently was very troubled, and nobody noticed.
Due to events at Dawson, the media yet again started lying about me and
about events on 1992. If you want to know the truth, please go to
http://geocities.com/benny_patrick.
Fabrikant