some questions can never have a satisfactory answer...
2006-09-13 | 10:34 p.m.

I didn't have any classes today, but I decided to go into the lab to do a couple of hours of work. It was around two when someone came downstairs to tell us what was going on at Dawson College, which is about a 15-minute walk from our building, maybe less.

The preliminary reports were saying that there might be as many as four gunmen, and at least one still on the loose. They were saying that there was also shooting going on in the mall across the street. They were saying that four people had been killed.

The facts finally came in. One gunman. One innocent victim dead. Several others in critical condition, but expected to pull through. It's not as bad as it could have been, but still. No words I can come up with are adequate.

I've never been to Dawson College, which is an English-language CEGEP in downtown Montreal. But it's a big school. I doubt there's an anglo in the city who doesn't know someone who goes there, or went there. The guy I'm dating went there, about ten years ago.

It was, of course, only to be expected that a lot of confused, conflicting information poured in all afternoon. And everyone wanted to know. Who did it? What happened to him/them? Was anyone hurt? Was anyone killed?

And, for me, the big question, the one that hasn't been answered as of the moment I'm writing this... why?

People don't go off and commit premeditated mass-murder and suicide-by-cop for no reason. They do it for stupid reasons, but that's not the same thing.

So, why?

What was he so angry about? Who did he hate that much? Who was he really trying to hurt, and what did he feel they had done to him?

Was it like Columbine, an outcast getting revenge? Was it religiously motivated? Was it about ethnicity or language? Was it based on a particular grievance against the school itself, like the 1992 shootings at Concordia? Was it about gender, like the École Polytechnique massacre, to which it is already being compared?

What was this grievance that he nursed so lovingly, this hate that mattered to him more than innocent lives, more than his own life? (Because, honestly, you walk into a public place with an automatic weapon and start shooting, you have to know there's a good chance the police are going to take you down.)

What was he trying to prove by shooting up a cafeteria full of young people, just starting out their lives?

That girl who died, I'm betting, never did anything to him. In fact, it would surprise me if they'd ever even met. And she certainly never asked or intended to be a symbol of whatever it was he hated so much.

So why did she have to die?

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