A grim day in September

The Dawson College shooting was, as these things always are, a shock. A tall, good-looking young man of 25, wearing a long black trench coat (think The Matrix), parked his car, unloaded two or three very conspicuous guns, and started shooting people. First outside of the college, then inside.

Luckily, a couple of cops were in the area, apparently engaged in a drug bust. They reacted immediately, and in a fairly short space of time, the gunman was dead. At first the police thought they had “neutralised” him, but it later turned out that they only shot him in the arm, at which point he put his own gun under his own chin and pulled the trigger. Still, he had managed to do enough damage to ensure himself immortality: one student was dead and 19 others injured, at least two critically.

Immortality — of a sort — is certainly what this icy young man, Kimveer Gill by name, has achieved — at least in the strange cyber-universe of the World Wide Web, where my last check revealed 899,000 entries against his name. He’s even in Wikipedia, which is probably the ultimate in internet renown.

It’s in a way fitting that this virtual realm is where his fame will reside: he himself was a kind of cyber-creation. An avid contributor to a vampire weblog (or “blog”), on which he had posted grinning, insouciant photos of himself — trench coat, guns and all — Gill had also posted grimly foreboding texts declaring his hatred for mankind and his longing for blood and mayhem.

The fact that none of the blog’s readers thought this weird, or even mildly disturbing, underlines, for me, the theatricality of Gill’s Grim Reaper persona. To them, he was just another dude — like themselves — playing “goth.” (Though seriously: the guns, if nothing else, should have raised some eyebrows — shouldn’t they?)

On Wednesday September 13 (no-one has yet named it Black Wednesday) Gill’s fantasy persona crossed over, dramatically, into the real world. No-one, least of all his parents, with whom he lived, seems to have figured out why. But that’s not for lack of speculating about it. As you might imagine, for days the media could think of nothing else — countless guest hosts and discussion groups weighed in on the issue; editorials and columns waxed eloquent. And sometimes controversial. By far the most shocking to the delicate national sensibility (and generating almost as much media babble as the shootings themselves) was a piece by Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong, who had the nerve to suggest that, just maybe, linguistic and racial marginalisation might have had something to do with Gill’s explosive behaviour.

Worse, she was tactless enough to bring up the fact that Quebec was the only province (and Montreal the only city) thus far to suffer spree shooters in not one, but three post-secondary institutions (the other incidents occurred in 1989 and in 1992); and that in each case the shooter was not what the locals (used to) refer to as “pur laine,” or pure-bred Quebecois-ie white from a French background. Gill was of East Indian heritage; his predecessors were half-Algerian and Russian, respectively.

Wong’s suggestion that Quebec’s unforgiving language laws may result in social (and almost by definition, racial) alienation, which could be partly responsible for these “mentally disturbed” individuals going off the deep end, was met with general outrage. It didn’t fit in with Canadians’ carefully-nurtured image of themselves as a nation of equity and non-discrimination.

Not only the Quebec premier, but the Prime Minister himself promptly condemned Wong and berated the Globe and Mail for running her column. Media pundits pontificated, and angry readers called for her dismissal. This, mind you, in a country which is equally adamant that it respects free speech; and which is sending its soldiers off to ensure that Afghanis someday get it too! The hypocrisy is blinding.

I don’t necessarily agree with Wong’s analysis (it requires a leap in basic logic and besides, I have my own theory); but I maintain her right to raise the issue, without finding herself one step short of the firing squad. That’s what freedom of expression means. And as it happens, her overall account of that fateful day’s events is the best I’ve read.

More than language barriers, what interests me about Kimveer Gill is the fact that in 1999 he tried to join the Canadian Armed Forces. After a scant month of basic training, he and the army parted company. Officials have been very closemouthed about his time there; however Wikepedia confidently declares that, “He was deemed unsuitable for military service and agreed to leave before receiving extensive weapons training.”

Why does this intrigue me? Well, as it happens, Montreal’s 1989 shooter (Marc L?pine, also 25) had also attempted to join the Armed Forces, and was rejected. That in itself may not mean anything obviously, most army recruits are not nutcases — but it correlates rather interestingly with an internal army study in 2005 which found that young Canadians interested in joining the military tend to be “lacking in life goals and feel alienated from society and its values.”

The report, which was co-authored by three senior officers, claimed that these would-be recuits are “attracted to violence more than the average Canadian and accept violence as a legitimate way of getting what they want.”

They seek a military career to fill their need of “being someone and belonging to something” and to “break out of their isolation.”

Sounds a lot like Kimveer Gill — and, for that matter Marc Lepine. Maybe there’s something there that bears closer examination.

And maybe, while we’re at it, Ontario should rethink its policy of allowing the Armed Forces to recruit future reservists directly through Toronto’s high schools, via a co-op, hands-on-the-weapons programme that offers academic credits. Surely the Kimveer Gills of this world should not be encouraged; and even trained?