, 12.06.2023 01:45 AM

Fourteen reasons

…why we still need effective gun safety laws, and why we need to stop violence against women.

So many years ago.

  1. Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
  2. Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  3. Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  4. Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  5. Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
  6. Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
  7. Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
  8. Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
  9. Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  10. Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
  11. Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
  12. Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  13. Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
  14. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

53 Comments

  1. the salamander says:

    .. the loss of those fourteen
    haunts me.. to this day
    always will.

    So gracious of you to embrace rhem ..

  2. Robert White says:

    I started university back in 1989 and was writing my exam for Human Genetics & Evolution-Biology elective when these women were slaughtered in Montreal. University was never the same after that and I could sense the worry en masse in terms of female students from that juncture.

    As a graduate of Mechanical Engineering [Tool & Die Making] I, for one, lament the loss of women in Mechanical Engineering. There were no female students in my college course for Mechanical Engineering which I though was odd given how much fun Mechanical Engineering is.

    I got all of my Mechanical Engineering talent from my mother and NOT my father who was all thumbs with Coke bottle glasses. Mother was a superior intellect when it came to Carpentry & Engineering.

    RW

  3. Beth Higginson says:

    I agree

  4. Pat Y. says:

    As much, we need stop violence in the home – Gamil Gharbi (aka Marc Lépine) was “radicalised” by his violently abusive Algerian father e.g. “1970, following an incident in which Rachid struck Gamil so hard that the marks on his face were visible a week later…” (Wiki). This is the dark truth none dare speak of…

    • Daryl Gordon says:

      I agree completely. This incident , to use virtue signalling extrordinaire Trudeau’s pet phrase “The root cause” was whitewashed by the political correctness police immediately. His background and his given name were ignored, all focus on his crimes were diverted to gun control.

      The Liberal long gun registry emerged out of this tragedy and was a colossal financial and administrative failure. Now the focus is on handguns, already restricted to the point of being useless to law abiding citizens.
      Criminals and the mentally ill do not and never will comply with firearm regulation. Legal owners are subject to onerous conditions, face criminal penalties for simple acts like transport, storage, and administration errors. More regulation also means more money for black market gun dealers pedalling Saturday night specials. How about focusing enforcement there instead of hunters, farmers and other rural citizens.

      Right now in rural western Canada there is an epidemic of property and personal crime. Most legal residents can expect long response times from police if at all and a lenient court and justice system for the few criminals actually apprehended.

      Across the country there are thousands of firearms that were never registered and never will be.

      • Fred from BC says:

        Well said.

        Liberals will always talk about “more gun control” because it buys them votes from gullible people. Ask one to elaborate on how *exactly* their new regulations will help, and you’ll be glared at and accused of being a “gun nut”. Right now they are trumpeting the fact that 70% of Canadians (who, frankly, couldn’t even name three components of the ‘gun control’ that we already have) agree with them…and yet, earlier this year 70% of Canadians made it quite clear that they did not want the lyrics to Oh Canada changed, but the Liberals did it anyway. Seems that they only pay attention to public opinion when they can exploit it to further their own agenda…

      • pierre lawayne says:

        Bullshit. See Australia.

        • Fred from BC says:

          Bullshit yourself. Australia was the gun control lover’s favorite argument until it was carefully dissected, debunked and discarded. Try again.

        • WestGuy says:

          Australia is an island and doesn’t share a virtually open border with anyone, let alone the largest gun manufacturing country in the world. Any comparison to Australia is invalid.
          Gun control won’t make a difference. The police need to go after the smugglers and gangs. Hard. With none of that gang members as victims bullshit.

      • Terence says:

        Criminals start out as law abiding citizens. I don’t want them getting a head start acquiring hand guns and assault rifles. Face it. Society has a right to band together and protect itself from gun nuts.

        • Mike says:

          You forgot to add “see above three commenters” I’m sick to death of Right wing gun loving whacko’s.

        • Fred from BC says:

          Drunk drivers start off as sober drivers. I don’t want them getting tempted by all those different types of alcohol out there. Face it. Society has a right to band together to protect itself from the evils of alcoholic beverages.

          • Derek Pearce says:

            Society has a right to ban drunk driving and has. And the social pressure to not drunk drive is powerful. Your analogy is not apt.

    • Pipes says:

      Note that Warren did not mention the name of that piece of shit. His existence should be expunged but his murders should be remembered. But remembrance is nothing without constructive tangible change. As far as I am concerned, guns don’t kill people. People kill people with guns.

  5. Peter says:

    Around and around we go again. One side tries to draw a correlation between gun control and safety that simply cannot be made, while the other side finds itself defending the indefensible.

    It is impossible to make a case that there is a general correlation between strict gun control and low gun homicide rates. There are countries with tight gun laws, low rates of legal gun ownership and very high gun homicide rates (Brazil, Mexico, South Africa). Russia has one twentieth the number of legal gums as the States and over twice the number of gun homicides. There are countries where every adult is armed, but which have very low gun homicide rates (Switzerland, Israel). There are poor countries with low rates (India). Britain has one third the number of legal guns as France and Germany and a slightly higher gun homicide rate. The U.S. has an obscene number of legal firearms (half the world’s total), but nowhere near the highest gun homicide rate. If you subtract criminal and gang-related urban handgun homicides, its rate plummets to near-European levels. As viscerally horrific as they are, deaths from mass shootings and assault rifles are almost statistically negligible. Women worried about safety and violence would be well-advised to focus their energies elsewhere.

    OTOH, it’s pretty hard to come up with a reason why anyone would need an assault rifle or even, in urban areas, a handgun, but plenty of reasons why unarmed citizens would fear them. The point is that there is much more in play here than just gun laws. Culture counts. Canadians knows better than anyone what a huge and futile waste of money and law enforcement resources gun control measures born of a righteous urban-progressive mentality can be. But there are a lot of people in the world who know what the terror of living in armed cities is like. I have no easy solution, but I have been convinced that general gun laws play a very minor role in making my community and family safe and that arguing about this issue in the context of preventing gut-wrenching mass murders will accomplish very little.

    • Terence says:

      “Women worried about safety and violence would be well-advised to focus their energies elsewhere.”

      Yes. On their male partners who have hand guns and assault style rifles. Most of the people who shoot people with guns weren’t criminals before they shot someone.

      • Mike says:

        You’re spinning your wheels talking sense to right wingers. They are full of shit. They need look no farther than England where a terrorist had to use a knife and was taken down by bystanders.

      • Fred from BC says:

        “Yes. On their male partners who have hand guns and assault style rifles.”

        Yes, because all men are walking time-bombs just waiting to explode into a violent rage and shoot their spouses, right?

        (do you and your kind even hear yourself when you speak? Grow up…)

        • Derek Pearce says:

          Don’t tell me that men who own guns (or want to) commit less spousal abuse than those who don’t.

          • SuburbanGuy says:

            “Men”. Men who own guns legally and jump through every hoop to stay in sync with the law? Or are you just projecting gangsta’s as your representation of all men who own and use guns? How about police and the military? Your generalizations are pathetic.

  6. Henry says:

    One aspect to gun control that is never mentioned by our politically correct toady media is that most of the illegal guns in Canada have been smuggled in through the various Aboriginal reserves situated on the U.S. border !

  7. Dave says:

    Ban all guns. But Google PA Luty, his stuff is now showing up in Australia.

  8. Any civilized country will of course need strict (but fair) firearms regulations. It also needs to be admitted that this is primarily an urban issue. With our proximity to the US, it is ludicrous to think that simply passing a law prohibiting firearms will prevent criminals from possessing them. That is not the current situation (criminals are acquiring them illegally now), nor will it be in the future. Let us not forget that unscrupulous politicians will seize on issues like this for their own partisan purposes. Mental health issues should really be the focus here as much as well.

  9. Mike says:

    Warren, please excuse my outspoken comments to some of your commenters. As I watch the insane right wing nuttery down south and other places worldwide I am physically sickened by it. I’m fast coming to the conclusion that conservatism is a mental disease. And I say that having a few in my own family.

    • Peter says:

      I feel your pain, Mike. You are far from the first leftist to see anyone who doesn’t agree with you as mentally ill, but it must be terribly unsettling for you to realize how it can be contagious.

      • Steph says:

        I have lots of friends who don’t agree with me dipshit. And assholes who refer to people as leftist belong in their mommies basement.

        • Steph says:

          In case you’re wondering, I’m at my brothers house using his iPad…
          Mike

        • Fred from BC says:

          “And assholes who refer to people as leftist belong in their mommies basement.”

          I see. So where do those who refer to people as “right wing gun-loving whackos” belong, then? Mommie’s attic?

  10. Zachary says:

    Nothing like an article on gun control to peel back the layers of civility that both the right and the left normally hide behind. But especially the left. Check out the vitriol here already.

    • Fred from BC says:

      ” But especially the left. Check out the vitriol here already.”

      I know, right?

      Don’t they realize just how fragile and sensitive we mentally ill, full of shit, gun-loving whacko hillbillies can be? That’s just Mean Girl bullying right there…:(

    • Mike says:

      That’s because you right wing assholes are the ones doing the shooting.

  11. Brian says:

    Our gun laws are fine…. Lack of accountability and the all too easy “mental illness” defenses need to go.

    Put the sick in mental hospitals. Stop making attempts to “understand” murderous piles of garbage. Leave law abiding citizens alone. It never ends with the gun nuts…. As leftists they have nothing better to do than go after law abiding, tax paying, good Canadians while protecting the “poor, downtrodden, misunderstood, so called-mentally ill.”

    Lock up the criminals. Bring back the death penalty. Execute the perpetrators painfully. Remove the insanity defense.

    We have a PM who may be a paedo, has a best friend who is a convicted child porn trafficker, is openly a racist, clearly a bigot and has admitted to grabbing a woman by her privates—-“she remembered it differently…”

    See how guns are an easy way to start scaring people when the only one to be scared of is our present government, all Liberals and a PM who is all of the things Liberals claim not to be—-Time to buy in kids—After Trudeau voted positively for an anti- Israel declaration, YOUR Liberals are fast becoming, YOUR Nazi’s. Wake up. Guns aren’t the problem. Liberalism is.

    • Mike says:

      Nice image of a distopian society ya right wing lunatic.

      • Robert White says:

        Brian is a Conservative supporter and is supported by Conservatives in kind. He never has a kind word for any Liberals at any time. He works for Sun News and the political right in Canada. His arguments are usually biased as heck but sometimes his points are valid.

        He is usually snarky as a character but he holds a train of thought well and he rarely makes any big mistakes in logic.

        He’s the kind of guy that would pick a fight with anyone.

        I kind of like his character.

        RW

    • Gilbert says:

      I agree with removing the insanity defence.

  12. Peter says:

    Hey everybody, who is willing to chip in to buy Mike and Brian a nice dinner so they can work it all out and come up with a nice civilized compromise?

  13. Pipes says:

    I don’t have a gun because I don’t intend to shoot anything. Think about that.

    • Steve T says:

      Yep, I thought about it for about 2 seconds. I do have a few guns, because I go hunting.
      I only hunt things that I eat (geese and deer), and my guns otherwise remain trigger-locked and locked in a gun safe in the back recesses of my basement the other 11 months of the year.

      So your point was…. what exactly?

  14. Yet Another Calgarian says:

    Last round of Liberal firearms bans are just about to start getting undone by the courts for… as shocking as this willl be… not following Canadian gun control laws.

    Yet more proof this lot has little clue and even less respect for the law.

    Junior will be out of office beofre they get a chance to unscrew their mistakes so wave goodbye to gun control for another generation.

  15. Beth Higginson says:

    Warren – I agree with you on this.

  16. Chris Haines says:

    Warren, you’ve posted this every single year that I can remember reading your website. I love how you always print their names and not just reference the tragedy. I also love how you highlight what they were studying because we need more young women in engineering. My daughter Grace will be heading off to university next fall and studying engineering (sadly a year late after being the victim of a hit and run car accident which she is still recovering from). I don’t know if my encouragement of her university choice was influenced by that terrible day, but I see no better response than for us all to encourage women to follow in their footsteps.

  17. This is just another horrible reminder what assault “style” weapons can do. I think Erin finally gets it and will drop his previous lunacy on the question into the ash heap of history — either that, or forget until forever having a reasonable chance of winning the next election.

    Mind you, O’Toole is improving: his mastery on the anti-conversion therapy bill gives me hope. But the real test comes in the other place and he had better be thoroughly prepared to kick some serious CPC butt in that chamber otherwise this political gain goes right down the dumper. Hopefully, Plett is already on board otherwise…

  18. western view says:

    I mourn the loss of so many lives at Poly Technique, extinguished in the blink of an eye by a demented mind.

    I mourn for families mowed down in broad daylight by drivers full of hate, using vehicles as weapons. An Muslim family in Ontario quickly comes to mind.

    I mourn for young people attracted to gang life, and pressured into violent activities as a rite of initiation. These young people are also attracted to a semblance of family structure that is often missing in their lives. I mourn for the collapse of their family structure at home.

    We have many problems in our society, and I mourn our inability to have fair minded conversations about these issues and how we can make our communities safe for everyone. Weaponization of these serious problems for political gain is turning the dialogue into a slug fest and getting us nowhere.

  19. Steve T says:

    Effective gun safety laws – definitely.
    The garbage the Liberals tried to sneak into law – definitely not.

    When you’ve got the Conservatives, Bloc, NDP and even the CBC all lined up to express legitimate surprise at the nonsense the Libs tried to add to C-21, you know there was a major screw-up.

    C-21 started off with some decent ideas, but then tone-deaf Liberals MPs decided to jump the shark and hope no one was looking.

  20. EsterHazyWasALoser says:

    We live in a parliamentary democracy, and the government has the right to regulate firearm ownership. We will never be able to completely prevent criminals from acquiring firearms; everybody knows that. The mentally disturbed person who murdered all of those innocent young women is whom society is trying to stop from legally accessing the types of weapons that can be used in mass shootings. There will always be a degree of tensions between Libertarians who want to live in a society with no restrictions and minimal governance and groups who want a more activist government in their lives. The trick is finding the right balance.

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