(no longer) LOST IN JAPAN

Montreal in the News...

Well... here I am trying to convince people to come and visit me in Montreal and stuff like this happens. This afternoon at 12:45, 2 gunmen dressed in black opened fire in the cafeteria of Dawson College, an English-language CEGEP (pre-university) in downtown Montreal. 12 people were injured, 6 in critical, 2 in serious and 4 in stable condition. It's almost 4PM now and police and SWAT teams are still on the scene, looking for any survivors that may still be barricaded inside the classrooms. Montreal police neutralized one gunman and the other took his own life.

It's frightening really. This shooting bares striking resemblance to one of the darkest days in Montreal history. On December 6th 1989, Mark Lepine shot 27 women, 14 fatally, before turning the gun on himself. Lepine, angry that he hadn't been accepted into the programme at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, blamed an increasing number of women in the engineering faculty and thus entered into the building and opened fire.
This event prompted stricter gun laws accross Canada... and yet, 17 years later, people can still enter our schools with assault rifles. Perhaps I am a pessimist but I find it quite worrisome... Because if people want it bad enough, they will find a way to circumvent the laws and cause pain and suffering to innocent people...
My sister's boyfriend is a student at Dawson and was in the building when it happened. Luckily he came out of it alive but it scares me to think about what could have gone wrong...

No word yet as to motive...

Here are the reports so far: CTV, BBC, CNN... I'm sure there will be more to come...

posted by Samantha @ 3:47 PM