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Ordinarily one should not rely on the National Post for social commentary, but today's editorial nailed it (in striking contrast to the shrieky, grating, entirely predictable tone of the rest that paper's coverage of the event):
Dawson shootings
Published: Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Columbine High School tragedy of 1999 was memorable not only for its horrific toll -- 15 dead, including the two teenage shooters -- but for the hysterical media coverage that followed it. Readers will recall that the massacre perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Jefferson County, Colo., was turned into a societal morality play, with every possible youth-culture phenomenon brought in for blame. The alleged root causes included bullying, violent video games, the Internet, "Goth culture," cliques, death-metal music, high school jock-ocracy and even anti-Christian bigotry. In the end, it turned out that these theories were nonsense. In particular, it is now known that, far from being bullied pariahs, Harris and Klebold had a wide circle of friends, some of whom seemed to have at least vague knowledge of what they the pair were planning.
We hope the same mad rush for scapegoats doesn't emerge after yesterday's school shooting at Dawson College in Montreal. In the years following Columbine, there have been scattered school shootings across North America. And of course, Columbine itself was preceded by the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of Dec. 6, 1989, in which gunman Marc Lepine killed 14 students. To the extent these shootings follow a pattern, it is not one that can be traced to any particular social or technological phenomenon. Rather, the gunmen -- they are all male -- invariably are motivated by a turgid mental stew of victimization, delusion and a hunger for notoriety.
Borderline mental disease also seems to play a role: The FBI's lead Columbine investigator, for instance, believed Harris, the Columbine mastermind, possessed a pathological superiority complex. As for Lepine (whose name had once been Gamil Gharbi), he had developed an obsessive belief that all of his problems -- including the refusal of Ecole Polytechnique to grant him admission -- were the result of feminists. (This may have has something to do with Lepine's upbringing by a reportedly misogynistic father.)
There is simply no way that a society can entirely eliminate the risk of such attacks. Teens and young adults develop all sorts of unstable, self-destructive neuroses. Only a few take on the extreme, pathological mindset that leads to nihilistic murder. But all it takes is one or two.
Nor can a society entirely eliminate access to guns. Unless we want to do away with hunters, police, soldiers and sport shooters, we will always have to deal with the existence of some small quantity of (highly regulated) firearms being in circulation. Gun control is effective only up to a point. In any society, a criminal who wants a gun will get one. (In Canada, the usual practice is to buy an American handgun on the black market.)
To the extent such tragedies offer any useful lessons, it is that citizens must remain vigilant in picking up on the warning signs they see in others. We don't know yet whether the perpetrator of the Dawson shootings had given any hint of his dark scheme. But if he followed the pattern of most school shooters, they did. (Harris and Klebold, for instance, began openly fantasizing about murdering their classmates on their Web pages as early as 1997.)
Instead of hunting for external phenomena on which to blame this tragedy, Canadians should focus their attention on the real "root cause" of school shootings: troubled souls.
© National Post 2006
Dawson shootings
Published: Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Columbine High School tragedy of 1999 was memorable not only for its horrific toll -- 15 dead, including the two teenage shooters -- but for the hysterical media coverage that followed it. Readers will recall that the massacre perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Jefferson County, Colo., was turned into a societal morality play, with every possible youth-culture phenomenon brought in for blame. The alleged root causes included bullying, violent video games, the Internet, "Goth culture," cliques, death-metal music, high school jock-ocracy and even anti-Christian bigotry. In the end, it turned out that these theories were nonsense. In particular, it is now known that, far from being bullied pariahs, Harris and Klebold had a wide circle of friends, some of whom seemed to have at least vague knowledge of what they the pair were planning.
We hope the same mad rush for scapegoats doesn't emerge after yesterday's school shooting at Dawson College in Montreal. In the years following Columbine, there have been scattered school shootings across North America. And of course, Columbine itself was preceded by the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of Dec. 6, 1989, in which gunman Marc Lepine killed 14 students. To the extent these shootings follow a pattern, it is not one that can be traced to any particular social or technological phenomenon. Rather, the gunmen -- they are all male -- invariably are motivated by a turgid mental stew of victimization, delusion and a hunger for notoriety.
Borderline mental disease also seems to play a role: The FBI's lead Columbine investigator, for instance, believed Harris, the Columbine mastermind, possessed a pathological superiority complex. As for Lepine (whose name had once been Gamil Gharbi), he had developed an obsessive belief that all of his problems -- including the refusal of Ecole Polytechnique to grant him admission -- were the result of feminists. (This may have has something to do with Lepine's upbringing by a reportedly misogynistic father.)
There is simply no way that a society can entirely eliminate the risk of such attacks. Teens and young adults develop all sorts of unstable, self-destructive neuroses. Only a few take on the extreme, pathological mindset that leads to nihilistic murder. But all it takes is one or two.
Nor can a society entirely eliminate access to guns. Unless we want to do away with hunters, police, soldiers and sport shooters, we will always have to deal with the existence of some small quantity of (highly regulated) firearms being in circulation. Gun control is effective only up to a point. In any society, a criminal who wants a gun will get one. (In Canada, the usual practice is to buy an American handgun on the black market.)
To the extent such tragedies offer any useful lessons, it is that citizens must remain vigilant in picking up on the warning signs they see in others. We don't know yet whether the perpetrator of the Dawson shootings had given any hint of his dark scheme. But if he followed the pattern of most school shooters, they did. (Harris and Klebold, for instance, began openly fantasizing about murdering their classmates on their Web pages as early as 1997.)
Instead of hunting for external phenomena on which to blame this tragedy, Canadians should focus their attention on the real "root cause" of school shootings: troubled souls.
© National Post 2006