I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, but my first thought on reading about this was, “Damnit, not Canada!” I know, I know, but I look rather fondly on our northern neighbors as the us we might be if we were a little saner. But, I suppose if your neighbor is diseased, it’s only a matter of time before you’re infected, too.
That’s just asinine. Canada is not some sort if utopian nation state where everyone loves everyone else and violence, bigotry and the general mish mash of human stupidity doesn’t exist.
We’ve had shootings before; we’ll likely have them again. This has nothing to do with the US being some sort of leprous nation infecting poor innocents around the world.
Note to self – never express sympathy or admiration for Canadians. They get nasty. And they have no social grace. Must be the cold.
:rolleyes:
Nah, it’s the hats.
Sunrazor, I understand that your post was well-meant and I appreciate the sentiment, but it was kinda silly. Of course Canada has everything that the U.S. has, including all the bad stuff. I think maybe the reason Grey got a little snippy is because your post sounds like something someone who had no idea of what Canada really is at all would post. (Jeeze, could that be a more awkward sentence?!) What I’m trying to say is that as Canadians, we are probably too sensitive about our closest neighbours being so darned ignorant about everything about us. Jim and I like to joke that when United Statesians look at maps of North America, the space that Canada occupies is labelled “Here There Be Dragons.” 
While Canada is definitely not a utopia, I’ve heard several Montrealers say about the same thing. But I guess ‘I can’t believe it happened here’ is pretty standard after something like this. The city is pretty tolerant, which makes the killer’s clichéd cries of being bullied and ostracized so odd. This isn’t a tiny town with nowhere for a goth or punk to escape to (even if he did live in Laval). Heck, a quarter of the nightclubs cater to them. Piercing places and leather stores are a dime a dozen. There are kids doing medieval swordfighting every weekend, in public. So yeah, far from perfect, but not comparable to a small religious midwest town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Comparable to a small town anywhere, Montreal is a blessed island of tolerance. But let’s not forget the gay bashing that used to take place not too long ago, th shootings at Concordia and the Poly or the fire bombings of Jewish schools. It has all the flaws any place populated by people possesses.
Ultimately this walking piece of misery made the decisions to inflict pain, suffering and death on strangers for no reason aside from his egocentric sense of martyrdom. He deserves to rot in whatever hell the universe can come up with.
Fuck. I talked to my dad yesterday, and the busboy that works for him was more badly injured than I thought. He’s out of the hospital now, but with six bullet wounds, one of which went through his right arm, through his torso, and out through his left arm. A couple of millimeters difference, and that bullet would have hit his heart. It’s amazing it wasn’t a fatal shot.
He wasn’t a Dawson student, he was visiting his girlfriend over the lunch hour. He turned towards the sounds of the first shots, and saw Gill, maybe 20 feet away, look him in the eye, Gill smiled, and pulled the trigger. He fell over, then his girlfriend got shot 4 or 5 times in the upper body and neck, and somehow, the busboy (I don’t want to use his name) managed to drag her away into a nearby classroom. She was spitting blood “like a fountain” and despite his own wounds, held her up in a sitting position because he was sure she’d choke and die if she lay down. He literally saved her life. She’s the patient in the induced coma - as of yesterday, she was beginning to wake up and doctors were going to let it happen and see if they could wean her off the respirator today.
My dad is REALLY shaken up about all this. Busboy seems to think of him as somewhat as a father figure (I think his parents are divorced) and they always talked a lot about different things while at work. He called in to work (the story I related above) while in the hospital and hopped up on painkillers. He keeps calling my dad and updating him. My dad’s workplace will continue to pay his regular pay and today they were going to bring over some food and money that the staff got together.
He keeps asking my dad “Why did he shoot me, Mr C.? Why did he have to do that?” Hearing my dad’s voice crack as he told me that he had to tell him “I don’t know” was one of the most disturbing things I’ve heard in a while. I hope he’s somewhat comforted by the knowledge that he’s not only a victim, but a hero for taking care of his girlfriend and keeping her alive.
I never met this kid, but stories my dad tells makes me feel like I know him. Hearing how upset my dad is… fuck. I am still so shaken up by all this!
The bastard was so deranged that objective reality has practically no bearing on his POV. Christ, yesterday I read a quote from his MyMaladjustedSpace.com profile complaining that CSIS and the RCMP’s tactic of sending agents disguised as goth chicks to conduct surveillance on him was “not cool.”
Typical paranoiac. He probably creeped some people out or had some conflict with them so automatically they became part of the oppressing “other” to him. Alienate someone and when they withdraw believe they alienated you.
The thing that amazes me is, this fellow lived at home (despite being older than I am…) and yet he had all these weapons. Now, I’m pretty sneaky, but I doubt I could have concealed a BIG FUCKING GUN from my parents.
So your 25-year-old kid, unemployed, is living in the basement, constantly dour, and owns AN ARSENAL. And this throws up no red flags?
Further evidence of the awesome power of parental denial.
One must wonder what drove him nuts. More than the student who called him “a guy with a retarded haircut”
Huh. So much for the early reports that Gill “showed no emotion”.
Anyway, as brave and cool-headed as Busboy is, I can’t imagine he’ll be a busboy forever. Here’s to him, and his SO.
This guy sounds like he was just plain nuts. I don’t think anything drove him there. If it hadn’t been guns in a crowded place, he would have found some other way to hurt other people.
I agree with your second comment, but you think he was just genetically crazy?
I would think something was at least a catalyst. The Columbine killers, for example were harassed by the “normal” students.
From everything I’ve seen and heard, though, Gill wasn’t nor ever had been a student at Dawson College, so it doesn’t sound like he was being harassed by them or anyone else, at least not any more. The only reference I’d heard of has to do with his high school (Rosemere), not any Cegep. I don’t know if he ever went to Cegep. I found one article (online - don’t remember which newspaper) that said when he was 18 he signed up for the military, but never even completed basic training. I’d WAG that he chose that after high school, but it didn’t work out for whatever reason, and never went back to college or university. Maybe that’s why, at 25, he was still living at home. I haven’t come across anything saying if he had a job anywhere.
It makes me wonder if he somehow blamed college kids for being more successful, or for making better choices than him? Maybe he didn’t get accepted at Dawson college (although cegep entry criteria aren’t that hard to meet, and there are remedial classes available in order to get your diploma). Maybe Dawson was completely random, and he would have gone to another school or public place if something had deterred him.
'Genetically crazy"? I don’t know. Discussion of his blog suggests he was a highly paranoid person, suspecting CSIS and even the FBI of spying on him by sending in undercover goth agents. He assumed the police were constantly after him. Paranoid, delusional, and messed up enough to shoot up a college… that’s pretty crazy to me. Whatever rationale he might have had, it was totally blown out of proportion by whatever was wrong with his head. Had someone intervened, gotten him psychiatric help, perhaps this could have been avoided. But we’ll never know.
Jim and I were talking about this this afternoon, and like most things, we figured that it isn’t all that simple. Everyone could come up with an excuse to go up a clocktower, and there are plenty of mentally unstable people out there that don’t take guns to a crowded cafeteria and start blazing away. I guess it’s just a combination of the wrong mental state, in the wrong person, in the wrong circumstances.
For lack of a better term. A psychologist I knew in college said, “Some people are just crazy.”