I've been saying this for 16 years...
(UPDATE, Dec 11/05: Scroll down for corrections, plus an unearthed link to my Toronto Star column referenced below.) The young men who left their female classmates to their fates during the Montreal Massacre were wimps.
"Gharbi/Lepine killed 14 women, and only women, in an engineering class in Montreal University, using a Ruger Mini-14, a semi-automatic rifle in .223 caliber. "I recall reading about this at the time and wondering how he had done this without killing any men. "The answer is that he entered a lecture hall containing between 230 and 303 students, holding a rifle with at most 30 rounds of not very powerful ammunition. That is, it was lethal, but it didn't have stopping power, and he could have been disarmed by someone willing to fight back. [CORRECTION by RelapsedCatholic: I believe those figures refer to the room numbers, not the number of students in the lecture halls.]* "He fired two rounds into the ceiling and asked all the men in the room to leave. And they left."
Was that just a particularly sucky baby Canadian reaction on their part? Or is it just a side effect of modernity? Yes, there were men who pretended to be women so they could sneak onto Titanic lifeboats -- but they were reviled ever after. There was a time, a very long time, when no man worthy of the name would have slunk out of that classroom to save his skin. Hell, I was in the peace movement with pacifist men who wouldn't have walked out. I don't know what possibility is more disturbing: that I'm one of the only people I've ever met with the balls to state this opinion in public (I said the same thing in a Toronto Star piece on the 10th anniversary) -- or that many Canadians feel the same way but "don't want to say anything." Either way, I hate living here. Anyhow, not all Canadian men are wimps:
"In his review of Bowling for Columbine, Steyn said that Canadian blogger Colby Cosh was 'a braver man' than he was for pointing out why there are fewer gunshot murders in Canada, which has gun control and no death penalty, both of which tend to increase gun crime. Cosh pointed out that Canada has fewer blacks, who commit more than half of US murders."
UPDATE: Additional Canadian male non-wimpiness uncovered at Lost Budgie. *UPDATE Dec. 11/05:: James Fulford graciously acknoledges his numerical error here. As he says, he's still right, because the gunman was still outnumbered 50 to 1. Fulford also managed to somehow dig up a copy of that 1999 Toronto Star column of mine. I'm still rather proud of it, even though it displays for the world the person I used to be:
The office radio at the Catholic New Times newspaper was always tuned to CBC-FM so we could keep up with rapidly changing world events. (To my chagrin as the youngest staff member, rapidly changing musical events were clearly less important; the station's relentless repertoire of creaky British music hall tunes inevitably left me feeling trapped in a Dennis Potter miniseries.) But I don't remember the radio. Or actually, maybe, something about shots and thinking, as I always do: "Stupid Americans..."
Note the paragraph from the Globe & Mail right above my piece:
Still, the university decided to stick with its plans. "We wanted to let men express themselves because we hear very little from them," said André Labrie, co-ordinator of the university's committee on the status of women. "They had this whole sense of guilt. It was important to exorcise it." Serge St-Arneault, a missionary whose sister, Annie, perished in the shootings, said he has a message for the male students: "You are as much victims as those who died. . . . You are not responsible for the acts of an unbalanced man."
And they sit in bafflement as the pews empty around them.