Seeking Middle Ground

Travis Paterson, OP Opinions Editor

The Dawson College Shooting was Canadian.

The school system has tried to understand and put a clamp on bullying but it won’t stop.

The Gothic scene has now become a major scapegoat for its association with murders, but
that likely won’t stop either.

The online culture of blogging, a quieter off-shoot of the Internet revolution, has become
a place where people open up about their issues with day to day life, even venting threats, but
we can’t monitor the whole of society.

Kimveer Gill had an affection for the weather— he longed for a grey day to come when he
would fulfill his self-proclaimed prophecy as the “Angel of Death.

For every tragic shooting like Sept. 13’s Dawson College shooting, or 1989’s murder of 14
at Ecole Polytechnique, both of which took place in Montreal, there is only so much we can
do as a society to prevent unprovoked outbreaks like this from happening again. There is far
too much diversity in this country, and on this continent to band everyone together; that much
is clear. Even a state indoctrinated with fear can’t unite everyone, and with capitalism backed
by freedom of speech, there is a need to look out for one’s self before all else. It’s at the end
of the day when there is food on the table and a roof over our heads that we can think about
those outside of our immediate family and friends.

Last week’s shooting at Dawson College was a pointless tragedy, and didn’t need to happen.
It’s a problem that’s going to happen again with so many guns available in a society as free as
ours. It’s a problem that’s happened since the dawn of man. Somebody is going to go haywire.
Somebody is going to slip through the cracks, no matter how much we rally as a community
and a country to share our concerns and express our love and gratitude to each other.
Somebody is going to be left behind because in this society we have the right to hide in our
basement if we want to. Whether you’re a bullied Goth scenester or a disgruntled Postal work-
er, these are only titles for a recurring theme in the last twenty years.

Anastasia De Sousa had the unimaginable happen. Coming out of the cafeteria at her post-
secondary school, a place we might feel as safe sitting in as our own living rooms, she barely
had time to notice Gill’s presence, when seeing her for the first time ever, he shot her dead.
She didn’t have time to decide that he was dangerous, and even if she did, how would she
know? Because he was wearing a trench coat?

As soon as we leave the house, we meet new people. We might not say hello, but we look at
people, notice their clothes, their hair, their face, their teeth, their makeup and their piercings.
We notice their shoes and the bags they carry. We know right away that they are going to
school because they are young and carry a backpack, or that they are going to work because
they’re clad in business attire and carry a briefcase. We know this because we judge them,
because we compare them to those around us, to each other, to ourselves. It is our right to
judge, and although it is unfair to pass judgment, we have every right to express our reactions,
if we insist upon doing so. But we aren’t expected to pass judgment on someone just because

he is wearing a trenchcoat and the Columbine killers also wore trenchcoats. Did
time to make that link in her head before she died?

Kimveer Gill planned to kill humans, but didn’t know which humans, and to
don’t know why he chose the College as a target. That it happened at a school sk
dramatic impact. The Columbine tragedy shook both nations into an eye-poppin
how easily youth can obtain firearms, and how easy it is for a community to ove:
of troubled youth.

That Kimveer Gill was a grown man of 25 years sets him apart from the Co
tragedy, but with his trenchcoat and association with the gothic community, his ¢
similarities to the Trenchcoat Mafia of Columbine than to 25 year-old Marc Lep
suicide of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. But even at 25,
unable to let go of high school bullying, having made mention of it in his much
online diary at Vampirefreaks.com.

While Canadian and American media networks alike went tearing through hi
discrediting to see what little the American news-sites did to draw the similaritie:
Canadian and American youth in urban areas. In fact, their perspective was so fa
American reports immediately identified the situation as a “non-terrorist” attack
initial reports I read in Canada had considered it a possible act of terrorism, anc
From there, it was unlikely they would mention the lack of community support
guns as a growing problem in our neo-urban era.

The community to which I refer is not just Gill’s blogging contemporaries, b
physical friends that have stepped forward to speak of him. Not one person out
Internet seems to have had a relative intellectual relationship with Gill. The clos
Gill that have come forward so far are some neighbor’s who knew him enough t
Gill was always seen alone.

Judging by his pre-meditative frame of mind, he appeared calm and collectec
mental health had been tested in the days before his attack, he probably would I
deemed sound of mind. The tragedy preceding the shooting was that no one kn
enough to see him decline into the state that he did. Gill didn’t take refuge in a1
shed or isolate himself physically, but by isolating himself socially, we know that
strategic in his ways, and from his blog writing we know that he was quite intelli
failed functionally is associating himself with the two dimensional characters fro
games. When people begin to contextualize reality around a fictional character r:
admiring how a fictional character might fit into reality, they have crossed a line
unlikely they would leave the basement to deal with a face full of bare-knuckled

I would like to think that as Canadians we rally as fast, as close, and as stron;
munity in the wake of a situation like the Dawson College shooting, in hopes th
happen again, at least not in the foreseeable future, which is all we have.