Maybe there is no balm

Every time there is a dramatic, traumatizing event in society the breastbeaters (amateur and professional) come to the fore to either ascribe blame or to inform us what should have been done to keep a particular even from happening.

The case of the lone gunman at the hideous rampage at Montreal’s Dawson College this past week was no different from Columbine or any one of a number of such ghastly examples of a wacko “going postal” on innocent members of the public, and ultimately slaying some poor blameless soul (or souls) who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When we are traumatized or frightened, we try to find reasons for what has happened. We, all relatively sane I must assume, cannot fathom what distress would prompt a guy to go in and shoot up a school. Therefore we, in our relative sanity, must try to deduce why such a thing would happen.

We start with the blame game. In this case people, depending on their philosophical persuasion, have already blame gun laws for either being too lax or too stringent, entirely missing the point that if a ‘bad’ person wants to get his or her hands on a bit of weaponry, then he or she will do that, probably by illegal means, and no bit of officialdom is ever going to keep that from happening.

The shooter, Kimveer Gill, it has also been ascertained, was a subscriber to a number of ‘goth’ websites, and some have said his involvement in that particular lifestyle had a role to play, and therefore such sites should be regulated, or even banned.

While Goth has absolutely no interest for me, I find such a suggestion both fatuous and naïve. Is there really an assumption that that such a passion leads to murder and mayhem? If so, then why aren’t the other 99 percent of subscribers to such sites going out and mowing people down? This is an argument that is on a par with the one that calls for the censorship of pornographic sites because it has been found that ‘Rapist A’ was an avid cruiser of such sites, while ignoring the fact that the majority of people who get their jollies from such (sometimes very offensive) sites use them solely for those jollies, and will not be driven to go out and sexually assault somebody’s daughter, wife or sister.

And then the politicians are brought into the mix, and a frightened, sometimes outraged public demands that they take action, that they not only say something conciliatory, but that they take direct action – of some sort or another. This too is part of the blame-game. Bad things happen because of, oh, I don’t know, social alienation, poverty, poor schooling, bullying (a current cause celebre in youth-gone-wild scenarios), a flawed social system, a flawed legal system, and so on, and so on.

“Do something!” goes the cry.

“Do what?” can be the only answer. Politicians are not to blame for somebody going berserk. It is so easy to blame politicians. Personally, as a longtime journalist, I love blaming politicians for anything and everything. But, sometimes it simply doesn’t wash. Politicians are not to blame for some pathetic obsessive-compulsive sonofabitch wanting to wipe a bunch of people out for no reason that is apparent to anybody else.

Our society is such that we look to officialdom to protect us at all levels. This is impossible. Nobody could have stopped Gill before he did what he did, because nobody knew what he was going to do. Oh, the signs were there, no doubt, just as they were with the Columbine creeps, but signs are not enough to lock somebody up. But, people in a panic want to be protected. They want it to seem like governments are doing something. Are all the excesses of Homeland Security and the ridiculously anal restrictions imposed on airline travellers really making society safer? Of course not, but at least the appearance of something being done is out there, and this renders some people able to sleep more securely in their beds. The truth is, we are not one iota less imperilled than we were before 9/11, but the consolation maybe is we are probably not any more imperilled.

One thing we seem most loath to do, however, is look directly at the perpetrators of such ghastly incidents, whether it be Columbine, Oklahoma City, or Montreal. Why are we so hesitant to blame the creep who does it? Whether he is mad, or just plain evil, he is the person who carried out the crime and, blessedly, did society a favor by blowing his own brains out. Just too bad he didn’t consider the suicide course before slaying an innocent young woman and leaving her classmates in a state of posttraumatic shock that it will take a lifetime for them to get over.

So, you know, I absolutely do not care about his motivations. I just care that he did what he did, and blessedly is no longer sucking the same air as the rest of us. The only suggestion I can make in these cases is to take steps to identify such people earlier in their lives and to thwart them before they take drastic steps. The signs are there early on in so many cases.

The fly in the ointment of that scenario is, however, you cannot apprehend somebody ‘before’ a crime has taken place. Laws are always retroactive, unfortunately. This is the world. The vast majority of people are decent. The anomalies are sinister and dangerous. Always have been. Always will be.