The recent uproar concerning an overwhelming number of school shootings and the United States being the hub of such deplorable crimes isn’t something bizarre. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports 276 casualties at elementary and secondary schools from 2000 to 2021. As astonishing and horrific as it might seem, the process of obtaining a gun is easier than getting a passport or a driver’s license. Ironically, guns are weapons guaranteeing safety and are used by the ones assigned to safeguard constitutional laws. However, the problem does not lie with owning a gun; the problem lies with who and how the guns are handled and/or manipulated.
The geographical distance between the United States and Canada is 2260 kilometers. If we rewind to 1989, we can witness the gruesome École Polytechnique Massacre or the Montreal Massacre on 6th December that unsettled and distorted the whole idea of educational institutions being safe havens. The blood bath claimed the lives of fourteen female students, injuring another ten women and four men. The victims of the ghastly murder were in their 20s, on their last day of the semester, anticipating a relaxed and blissful holiday in the company of family and friends. Little did they know, that their lofty ideas, bold dreams, and invaluable lives were to be cut short in the blink of an eye. The women were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Most of these women were working on developing the STEM course that would eventually alter the course of teaching methods and understanding in the 21st century.
The shooting was a result of insecurity and a misogynistic attitude. Marc Lépine né Gamil Gharbi felt threatened by these meritorious women. So, he cornered them at one side of a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and opened fire with his Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle, killing six women on the spot. Later, he attacked and killed eight more women before fatally shooting himself. He justified his sinister act as a fight against feminism.
Men feeling threatened by women is not an unusual issue. What all the school or college shootings have in common is the loss of innocent lives. The killer instinct always seeks prey or victims who seem vulnerable, and naïve. In most of these mass shootings, children, young adults, or, in this case, the fourteen women, were targeted by the murderer to exert a power play. The tendency to give shape and form to every idea based on masculine parameters has its consequences. This domination over ideas and social constructs gives rise to active maleness which is in an eternal battle to subdue women to render them passive. The green-eyed monster of the Montreal massacre lost sight of his own purpose and felt threatened by these fourteen women who were “more slippery, more fluid, less fixed and more playful than man.” (Cixous) To him “man must write man.” (Cixous) The fluidity and flexibility of these women make the binary oppositions of man/woman, Self/other, and active/passive fall apart. Subsequently, the collapse of this power structure leads to the fall of the symbolic and social order. The position of women in the Symbolic is founded on lack – the lack of a penis/phallus which prohibits them from identifying themselves with the center, thus, disallowing them from taking the position of the center or the subject. However, women often ‘escape discourse’ with the help of tools, such as ‘pen(s)’ or language. Thus, the metaphorical penis i.e. the pen, assumes a mightier position. Moreover, when women become active subjects their language and actions become incoherent and contradictory to patriarchal ideologies because “…there is no pure feminist or female space from which we can speak. All ideas, including the feminist ones, are in this sense ‘contaminated’ by patriarchal ideology.” (Moi)
So, he took the gun and the hunting knife in his hands in an attempt to resist or end feminism. This anti-feminist stance of his is often attributed to the regressive mentality of his father and his disturbed childhood. Barnhorst A. (2018) cited that mass shooters “are driven by a need to wield their power over another group…It’s not an altered perception of reality that drives them; it’s entitlement, insecurity, and hatred.” Thus, being a typical adherent of patriarchal ideologies, Lépine was provoked to kill these women and assert as well as reinstate his (or his race’s) dominance.
Unfortunately, the bullets of the monstrous anger of a gun pierced through the mortal bodies of these fourteen women, murdering every unborn dream and every idea in their nascent stage. But even after all these years, their significant contribution to the world of academia is still venerated, and their reputation remains unassailable. They were women phenomenally. Phenomenal women.
Cixous, H. (1975). “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (1976)
Moi, T. (1989). “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, Wiley–Blackwell, 2nd Edition (1997).
Barnhorst, A. (2018). “Hate Is Not a Mental Illness.” Psychology Today. Retrieved July 1, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-crisis/201811/hate-is-not-mental-illness.
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