jhameia | Getting to know Montreal, December 6, 1989 (Reply)

Before coming to Canada, I had very little inkling of the Montreal Massacre, of December 6, 1989.

Because I know some of you are not Canadians and thus would not have had the same exposure to this incident as my Canadian friends are, the plain facts, boiled down as I understand them, are this:

On December 6, 1989, a man walked into a classroom of 60 at the l'École Polytechnique. He had a gun. Many bullets. He told the class to separate into men on one side, women on the other. He said, "I only want women." Once this was done, he asked the men to leave. Then he started shooting the women, shouting, "You're all feminists." He killed 14 of them. He injured several more students, both men and women. Then he killed himself. In his suicide note, he exhorted others to finish the job, blaming feminism for his problems.

This was an engineering class. The young women were 23. That's just two years younger than I am now. They were looking forward to careers in engineering, which was, and still is, a male-dominated field.

The killer had applied to get into the engineering degree the year before and failed. He blamed feminism for robbing him of his rightful place - after all, if women hadn't been given the chance, they wouldn't have taken his place. It is, of course, a situation that is several layers of Fucked Up.

Because it's just emotionally exhausting to talk about it some more right now, I have links for you:

What Was The Impact of the Montreal Massacre?

CKA News