easy answers, and the complete lack thereof
2006-09-16 | 1:14 p.m.

In the aftermath of what happened on Wednesday, a lot of people are jumping up with their thoughts and opinions on why it happened, and what should be done to prevent it from happening again.

Some people are blaming violent video games. Others are blasting the whole goth subculture for the actions of one person (and the fucked-up opinions of a few others). Some people are pointing out that Canada's gun control laws did nothing to prevent this, and therefore we should either make them stricter, or loosen them up. Some are saying that we should have metal detectors or keycard access or armed guards at the doors to every high school and CEGEP.

The people obsessing about video games and goth music are, of course, ignoring one very basic statistical fact-- correlation is not causation. Maybe that Columbine game made him hateful and violent. Or maybe, just maybe, he was already hateful and violent, and that was why the game appealed to him. Or maybe there's another link somewhere. I don't know.

And let's be honest ... do we really want to lock down every school in the city on the off chance that some rampaging villain is going to walk in off the street with a gun? Do we really want spend our money on armed guards at schools, money that could be better spent hiring support staff to catch these kids when they're young and prevent that kind of angry despair?

Living in fear is not the answer.

If there'd been more precautions at Dawson, enough to keep him out, what then? Maybe he'd have gone across the street and shot up the Alexis Nihon plaza. Maybe he'd have gone to the Concordia bookstore, or the McGill cafeteria. A high school. A Metro station. One of the eight zillion student-packed coffee shops in the downtown core. A different CEGEP. Since he had no connection to Dawson, he obviously didn't care that much what his target was, just so long as he caused the maximum possible amount of suffering and disruption. Are we going to lock the whole city down, just in case?

The world is full of dangers. People commit crimes. Freak accidents happen. The only way to completely eliminate any risk of losing your life is to die.

So... what's the answer, then? How can we stop this from happening again?

Everyone's talking about the lessons the Montreal police learned from the Polytechnique shooting, and what a difference they made. Rather than setting up a perimeter outside and waiting for him to give himself up, they went right in and took him down. That didn't eliminate the tragedy, but it made it so much less horrific than it could have been. Still. One death is one too many. And what about those people still in hospital? I'd lay odds that some of them are going to be physically and cognitively disabled after this, maybe severely so. And that's leaving aside the psychological traumas, the PTSD, the fear, the grief.

The truth is, I don't have an answer. I'm just like everyone else, all of those people screaming for tighter gun control, or looser gun control, armed guards or locked doors, the banning of violent video games, or of goth websites.

The only answer I can come up with is this-- we need to find a way to spot these people sooner, and to help them. After one day of placement in a school board, I'm finding myself all too painfully aware of just how thin the resources are, and just how many kids are slipping through the cracks. If someone, somewhere, had spotted that boy's anger and despair earlier on in his life, and been able to make a concerted effort to help him, not only would Stacy DeSouza and her classmates at Dawson College still be alive and unhurt and happy ... but so would Kimveer Gill.

Go on. Tell me I'm hopelessly naive. (I probably am.) Tell me that it was his choice, and no one else's, to do what he did. (Well, of course it was. Just because I'm trying to understand why he made it doesn't mean I think it's even remotely possible to excuse it.) Tell me that death was too good for him. (It was. He got exactly what he wanted, and that's so unfair it makes me want to scream.)

I know that no amount of support can save every single child, any more than any amount of security could keep out a determined killer. But I've seen, both in my own childhood and in the school system today, just how many cracks there are for people to slip through.

We'll never know what drove him over the edge, what pushed him over that line between angry and murderous, between being merely misunderstood and being a genuinely bad person. I doubt he could have pinpointed it himself. And maybe it couldn't have been stopped along the way. But maybe it could have. That's one more thing we'll never know.

So many lives shattered ... and so many things we'll never know. The senselessness of it all, the sheer wrongness, just makes me hurt.

And if it sounds like I'm preoccupied with trying to figure out the shooter ... I am. Maybe it's wrong to pay so much attention to him. Surely, that's part of what he wanted, too. But I can't help it. It's true that there's no good reason, just like it's true that there was no one mistake, made along the way, that turned a lonely, angry boy into a death-obsessed, hate-filled man.

That doesn't change the fact that, like everyone else in this city, I desperately want there to be.

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