Did I miss ‘Montreal Massacre Day?’
Damn! I had this great idea worked up for a spoof/correction of the “14 Not Forgotten” signs that I’d been meaning to…argh, I get so busy. Next year, then. Next year. (Sort of like Inspector Gadget, but with Marc Lepine: “I’ll get you next time, Gharbi…next time!”)
Oops, there I go, mentioning the Montreal shooter’s real (well…birth) name: Gamil Gharbi. Born to an Algerian Muslim father and a French Canadian mother, Gharbi grew up in a household where Mr. Gharbi thought of women as little more than chattel, and regularly beat his wife. It’s no wonder, then, that the man who would later style himself Marc Lepine (after his parents divorced) grew up hating women — who, of course, became the convenient scapegoats for his violent rage at his own scholastic shortcomings almost 20 years ago.
That would be this guy. Not exactly the image of the white-bread male oppressor that has been pushed and promoted by feminists for nearly two decades, eh? Looks a little more like the loser loners with the unkempt hair and strange odours that (and I speak here from experience) are all too common in first year engineering classes, but who tend to disappear from sight (and the faculty) after that point. Or maybe like someone who’s about to jihad an airplane into an apartment tower. I can’t decide.
Mark Steyn has been pointing out Gharbi’s history for years, so much so that he can probably recite all his main points from memory…and there are some good points.
The slaughter of 14 women has been used as a part of the justification for gun control legislation since pretty much the day Gamil Lepine (I do this: mix up the first and last names in different permutations) put finger to trigger, but gun control wouldn’t have done much to prevent him from opening fire in the first place — the gun he used remains legal in Canada, and I believe his personal firearm was duly and properly licensed. I could be wrong on the latter point, but I’m pretty sure that the Ruger Mini-14 is still legal here.
Of course, as Steyn notes, it wasn’t the lack of gun control that resulted in the deaths of those women. He points to the example of the Appalachian School of Law, in West Virginia, in which a would-be mass murderer was prevented from effecting his murderous designs…by a pair of students who happened to be exercising their legal right to carry sidearms that day.
No, it wasn’t the lack of gun control that killed these women. And it wasn’t a steaming undercurrent of misogyny that infests Canadian culture that is to blame either (feminist assertions nonwithstanding). As Kathy points out, what killed those women was, first and foremost, the cowardice of their male classmates in the face of a man holding a (small caliber) firearm. Marc Gharbi demanded that the men leave the classrooms he shot up, and the “men” therein did just that. It wouldn’t have been hard to bull-rush Gharbi, or to huck a bunch of textbooks in his direction (I speak again from experience: an engineering textbook is never light). Yes, people would still have gotten hurt, and possibly killed…but not 14 people. And, probably, not one woman.
But why did the men slink out, resigned in their cowardice to leave their female classmates to whatever fate the (probably smelly) loner with the wild hair and the gun had in mind for them?
Strangely, I blame feminism, at least in part. I blame anyone who preaches and teaches a doctrine of passivity, of non-violence even in the face of abject danger, and that it’s best to just do what the guy with the gun demands rather than risk provoking him. I blame anyone who discourages young boys from engaging in competitive or playfully aggressive outside activities, and the parent who is quick to shush the errant child that points his finger at a friend and says “BANG!” And I blame the anti-woman attitudes of an Algerian Muslim wife abuser, who evidently infused his attitude into his young son.
I don’t blame misogyny, and I don’t blame men in general, because no men were present during the Ecole Polytechnique shootings. Yes, people with male plumbing were there…but to a male, they weren’t men.
