Part 2: Remembering in Action

December 6th, 1989 started out like any other typical cold, Montreal winter day. It was also the second last day of semester for students at L'École Polytechnique. The engineering class, in room 303 on the second floor, was wrapping up student final presentations when a young man slowly entered the room. When he first interrupted the class with his request, "boys on one side, girls on the other", no one moved. No one recognized him, although he looked like he could be a student. He carried a Sturm, Ruger & Co. semi-automatic rifle, which at first glance seemed so preposterous that everyone thought it was a joke. Then he fired two shots into the air which immediately turned giggling into terror.

The males were told to leave the room; they did so without protest. And that is when 25-year-old Marc Lépine unleashed his rage. He shot all nine female students killing six. He stalked the halls, shouted his hate for "feminists" and shot women on sight. Over the course of the next 20 minutes, Lépine methodically stalked the cafeteria, the classrooms and the corridors of the school, leaving a bloody trail of horror in his wake. In four locations and over three floors of the six-story structure, he gunned down a total of 27 people, 23 of whom were women. He killed 14 of those women.

It was not a usual day for Marc Lépine. He planned that day carefully, spending months in anticipation of his attack. He was going to fight feminism. He was going get revenge on women that had rejected him. He would do it at the feminist-loving school that had also rejected him (twice) but accepted women into the engineering program -which he believed, was not a place for women. The feminists had ruined his life and now he would send them to their maker. He arrived on campus at 4 pm and sat in the registrar's office for about an hour. He had the three-page note that he had scrawled in 15 minutes in his jacket pocket. He had his rifle and knife in a garbage bag with two 30-clip magazines. It was around 5:10 p.m. on frigid Wednesday. He got up and started to walk towards the stairs. He was dressed in blue jeans, work boots, a dark jacket and a hat. That day was not a usual day. That day he changed Canadian history forever.

There can never be an answer or a reason for this carnage. We can call him a mad-man, a monster; but it will never bring back the lives that he took. Psychiatrists have attributed his actions to personality disorder, psychosis, or attachment disorder, or societal factors such as poverty, isolation, powerlessness, and violence in the media. It could also be because he was abused, neglected and bullied as a child or because of his broken home. There is no way to understand how someone could commit such a heinous crime, but yet it happened. And at the end of his 20 minute rampage, Marc Lépine turned his weapon against himself, blowing off the top of his skull.

The shooting at L'École Polytechnique, also called the Montreal Massacre, it is the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. It lead to more stringent gun control laws in Canada and introduced changes in the tactical response of police to shootings.

The gender of the victims and suicide note quickly led to the event being seen as an antifeminist attack and as an example of the wider issue of violence against women.

Now more than ever, "we need to double and triple our efforts at raising the issue of global violence against women and put in place solid mechanisms to combat these issues. If we want 1989 to teach us anything, let it be that misogyny doesn't take a day off." -Dr. Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa.