Some Murders Are More Equal Than Others

Kevin Steel, in today's shotgun (Western Standard blog) http://westernstandard.blogs.com/
comments on the 15th anniversary of the shooting rampage, in which 14 innocent young women at the University of Montreal were murdered by deranged gunman Marc Lapine. Steel contrasts public attitudes to the Montreal Massacre with the reaction to Andrea L'Abbe's December 1st fatal stabbing in Toronto of her husband and child (wounding another), while possibly suffering from post-partum depression.

One man's mental illness is apparently another woman's mitigating circumstance. Put another way, according to many women's movement activists, M. Lapine's mental illness does not excuse his actions, while Ms. L'Abbe's illness does excuse hers. Mr. Lapine is held to be an exemplar of the violence dwelling with all men, while Ms. L'Abbe is merely an individual victim of pressures brought by child birth. All men carry the mark of cain for the Montreal murders. No one, least of all Ms. L'Abbe, bears responsibility for the murders at her hand.

The legacy of Marc Lapine's deranged murders is hard to overstate. Certainly, the massacre brought into stark focus a very serious problem of violence against women. Unfortunately, there is no question that women activists have exploited the massacre by asserting that all men carry within them the potential (and by inference) the inclination, to commit such an act of butchery. The man who murdered is everyman. The unarmed men who fled the classroom in fear of their own lives are castigated as uncaring cowards.

Lapine is not, in fact, representative of men and of Canadian men, in particular. In a December 5, 1999 Toronto Sun article by Michelle Landsberg, she noted that Lapine only adopted the francophone Lapine as an adult. He was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of a Muslim Algerian mutual fund salesmen, who regularly beat young Marc/Gamil until his nose and ears bled. The elder Gharbi regularly also beat his wife and refused to allow her to console their tormented son. His father's traditional Islamic views on women and childrearing, combined with his obviously sadistic personality, created a destructive pychological brew for his son.

Refused his father's love and denied his mother's nurturing balm, Gharbi grew up to adopt his father's twisted view of women and ultimately unleashed his own pychological pain on those innocent undergraduates on that fatal day in 1989. Landsberg, and other feminists, of course, cannot resist the impulse to link Lapine's sick actions with men in general and use the memory of the Montreal Massacre to advocate for political action on the women's rights agenda. So it was, and so it remains.

I must confess to a resentment about this yearly memorial and the underlying ideological inference contained. I do not accept, as Ms. Lansberg did in her article, that men in Canada have a predisposition to do evil to the women in their lives. Men such as me were raised quite differently from Mr. Lapine/Gharbi, with quite different values. We are taught from an early age that men simply do not strike women for any reason. We are inculcated with a sense of responsibility for protecting our families and do so to the best of our abilities.

Most of us take our obligations as husbands and fathers very seriously. We are rather a quietly noble and sacrificial lot, as are (truth be told) our beloved wives and life companions. That this is so is a prime reason why this nation is such a great place to live. Oddly enough, there is a recognition of this fact in the scorn shown those men who fled the scene.

Feminists are disgusted by the men who fled Lapine's shootings precisely precisely because they sense on a visceral level that these men abandoned an unspoken manly duty to protect. That men do not have an obligation, under the total equality provisions of feminist thought, to charge an armed assailant with only their bare hands seems to escape those who feel most outraged by those men.

Secondarily, on a political level, the Montreal Massacre directly led to the adoption of the much hated and useless long gun (i.e., rifle) registry, which has cost us as taxpayers over one billion dollars (and counting). The Liberal government continues to spend obscene amounts of tax money on a hopeless bureaucratic long gun registry boondoggle, while illegally imported handguns are increasily being deployed by youths and street gangsters in our major cities to kill innocent men, women and children. The squirrel gun registry does not address this pressing issue, and in fact drains away fiscal resources that properly ought to be employed in dealing with hand guns (which have had to be registered in Canada since the 1930s) and with the street gangs, which use them to terrorize neighbourhoods and schools.

This politically correct long gun registry is a key symbolic reason why Western alienation continues to grow and is yet one more example of the utter incompetence of the Liberal party governing Canada without proper accountability for the tax revenues entrusted to them.