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Kimveer Gill, Dawson College, Root causes, anastasia De Sousa

Kimveer Gill -- perhaps he was just evil

By arthur Weinreb

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

It's been a week since Kimveer Gill walked into Montreal's Dawson College with three guns and began firing. By the time that Gill killed himself after being shot in the arm by a police officer, eighteen-year-old anastasia De Sousa lay dead and 19 others were wounded, some of them critically.

The discussions and debates have now begun, to use the popular vernacular, about the root causes that led a 25-year-old man of no particular note to embark on the shooting spree. Several theories will emerge and there will be no shortage of "things" to blame for what happened; but almost no one will actually blame Kimveer Gill himself.

Quick off of the mark were the anti-gun advocates. When Parliament resumed, interim Liberal leader Bill Graham wasted no time criticizing the prime minister for wanting to disband the long gun registry. It didn't seem to matter that the Liberal boondoggle was in full swing and running under which Gill, a member of a gun club with no criminal record, was lawfully entitled to possess. The mantra of blaming the guns, not people will be the focus of the debate that will ignore the shooter.

Gill loved violent video games, especially the one that was based on the shootings in Columbine in 1999 so naturally video games will come under attack. The fact that the vast majority of people who play these games don't go on Columbine-style shooting sprees will be deemed not to be a relevant factor in determining what happened last week at Dawson College. Ban the games, some will argue and nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever! Ditto for the Goth culture that Gill was a part of. He became a part of that culture and therefore it, not him, must be responsible for the shootings. Violent video games and the Goth culture will be blamed by many who will never give a moment's thought to the chicken and egg factor-- did these things contribute to Gill's desire to kill as many people as possible or was he attracted to dark culture and violent games because he was already predisposed in some manner.

There will be those, albeit they will be in the minority, who will blame Gill's parents. Why didn't they supervise him? Why didn't they realize what was going on? Let's not get confused here. Gill, like many others of his generation, lived at home with mommy and daddy, didn't work and didn't go to school. Despite the fact that he lived the style of a 5-year-old, he was a 25-year-old adult. There was no reason for his parents to supervise him or to attempt to determine what he was doing on the Internet. We excuse parents who can't be bothered supervising their underage children; we can't possibly blame Gill's parents for not watching their adult son more closely.

There are two factors that will never be blamed for Gill's rampage. One is the media that will certainly not be criticized by the media. Gill had told friends and acquaintances that they would be hearing about him on CNN, which of course is exactly what happened. Gill knew for a certainty that the cable news networks, desperate for news, would give him prominence. When John Mark Karr made his loony confession of killing JonBenet Ramsay, the cable news networks that were badly in need of content after the war in the Middle East wound down were only too happy to give him his 15 minutes of fame that turned out to be more like 15 consecutive days of fame.

More importantly, Kimveer Gill will never be blamed for the actions of Kimveer Gill. The notion that Gill was just an evil man and that he and not the gun registry, violent video games and the Goth culture were responsible for the carnage will be rejected by the masses as being too simplistic; too George Bush-like. In a society where many people can't recognize the evil of Islamofascism, it is too much to expect people to recognize the evil of what was once Kimveer Gill.

In the end, all that was responsible for the actions of Kimveer Gill was Kimveer Gill.


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