Montreal

I was absolutely shocked to hear about what happened in at a cegep (junior college equivalent) in Montreal yesterday. The incident has been compared to Columbine and to the Montreal Massacre. I think that the comparisons to Marc Lepine's horrific acts are somewhat misleading (read more about the Montreal Massacre here) because this incident seems to be more of a random act of violence; however, this is definitely reminiscent of other school shootings such as that in Columbine. Interestingly, there are many more school shootings that have occurred world-wide than most of us know of.

I don't have anything profound to say. I'm deeply saddened by the loss of 1 student so far, the wounding of 20 others, and the psychological trauma that so many students will have to live through. I hope that something constructive happens from this, but judging from the fact that school shootings have been happening for 10 years or more now and we still haven't been able to prevent them, I'm not optimistic. There is an article here that talks about the difficulty of profiling and predicting school shootings.

As I said before, this will not make me afraid to attend university or to speak my mind or make me support administrators who want to kick every goth kid out of school. I was a punk, I had a mohawk at one time amongst other ridiculous hairstyles (see below), I didn't shoot anybody. Neither did any of my friends. My mom works at a university. She wears a black trenchcoat... I don't think she's going to shoot anybody either. What we do from here on out has to be constructive, not reactionary.

Ridiculous looking, perhaps, but not a shooter