E-mail: A Canadian Connection?

A viewer north of the border -- a teacher at the University of Montreal, in fact -- sent us this e-mail late last night, which puts the Pennsylvania shootings in a different context. - Ed.

I have just finished watching your report of today's shooting in a schoolroom in Pennsylvania. I commend you and your team for your sensitivity toward the victims of these shootings, their families and the Amish community. However, I was struck by your failure to situate this event in the context of the Montreal massacre of 1989, when Marc Lepinesingled out and shot women university students at the Université de Montréal. Instead, you contextualized this shooting in a more limited way within "a number of shootings which have happened in the last two weeks" as well as the Columbine shootings.

U.S. news coverage of recent school shootings continues to ignore important parallels to the shooting of 25 women and 4 men at the École Polytechnique, Université de Montréal, on December 6, 1989, by Marc Lepine. Like Charles Carl Roberts IV, Lepine left a suicide message. Lepine's message explained his actions thus "…For I have decided to send Ad Patres the feminists who have ruined my life. It has been seven years that life does not bring me any joy and being totally blase, I have decided to put an end to those viragos….Being rather retrograde by nature (except for science), the feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventive leave) while trying to grab those of the men."

Like Charles Roberts, Marc Lepine entered the École Polytechnique classrooms, separated the young men from the young women, made the young women line up and shot them. He shot 25 women; 14 women died. This day is remembered every year in Montreal, especially by persons like me who work at the Université de Montréal and who knew people who were present at this shooting. Canada's Parliament has declared December 6 as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

Each time a school shooting happens, news reporters tend to say "not again" in disbelief, and at most draw comparisons to more recent U.S. shootings. Perhaps the parallels to the Montréal massacre are ignored because events north of the 49th parallel are routinely ignored in the U.S. media. Another Canadian school shooting happened as recently as September 13, when Kimveer Gill shot 19 students and killed one female; you did not mention this shooting in your coverage tonight.

Broadening your perspective to encompass the Montréal massacre is critical in order to deepen your coverage of the phenomena of school shootings. Instead of developing side stories about the nature of the Amish, you should be asking why men are still shooting girls and young women in North American classrooms nearly 20 years later. Instead of focusing on the gunmen's individual reasons for murdering students or treating them as isolated madmen, you should be asking why in repeated cases, girls and young women are being singled out, and why these shootings are being conducted by men. When reporting these cases, you must have the bravery to confront how these shootings are related to a combined hatred of women and glorification of violence.