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Guard against over-reaction

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Whenever a country faces a tragedy such as Montreal's school shooting this week, it's tempting to look for a magic solution, such as banning guns, video games or movies, to make sure it can never happen again.

However, experience -- unfortunately, North America has all too much of it -- shows that the chances of a very disturbed individual who reacts violently always will exist in a free society.

This despite assurances from advocacy groups that either curtailing free speech or dramatically curtailing the property rights of innocent people will somehow save us all from acts of madness.

The smoke was still wafting through the cafeteria of Dawson College in downtown Montreal when e-mails began to pour into The SP newsroom from across Canada that suggested, alternatively, that the shooting was proof that the ill-conceived gun registry either didn't go far enough or that it was irrelevant.

In an interview with a Toronto newspaper, staunch gun control advocate Wendy Cukier insisted the two common denominators to school shootings are angry young men and easy access to guns. This ignores one of the most famous school yard shootings -- that by an angry 17-year-old girl immortalized in a song after she shot up an elementary school because she "didn't like Mondays." Or the British man who in the 1990s attacked children at a day-care centre with a knife.

But if one wants to use sensationalism to make an argument, this shooting can support almost any position. Some have already called for restrictions on websites that foster the Goth lifestyle. They note that the Montreal shooter, Kimveer Gill, had posted his darkest thoughts on the same VampireFreaks.com site used by a 12-year-old and her 23-year-old boyfriend accused of killing the girl's family in Medicine Hat earlier this year.

It has also been pointed out that one of the favourite computer games of the troubled 25-year old Gill was Super Columbine Massacre, modelled after the April 20, 1999, rampage by the now infamous Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who killed 12 students and a teacher at their Colorado high school in an equally incomprehensible act of rage.

In fact, Danny Ledonne, creator of that game, posted a message of condolence on his site to say: "I am, like most, saddened by the news of the recent shooting at Dawson College. I extend my condolences to those affected by this painful event." But as odious as many may find the premise behind such computer games -- and there is no shortage of hunt-and-kill simulation games on the market -- one must recognize that almost none of the players act out the scenarios as Gill did.

And just because disturbed individuals may access video games, violent movies, the Internet or guns, there is little evidence that any of these are the cause of these relatively rare acts of violence. Those who would suggest curtailing everyone's rights as the way to stop the mad acts of these disturbed individuals crave a sad and restrictive world.

In fact the rights already surrendered didn't prevent Wednesday's tragedy. In spite of the extraordinary restrictions placed on the ownership of certain guns -- put in place to make sure the wrong people could never acquire them -- Montreal police say among the guns Gill used were a 9- mm semi-automatic rifle and a .45 calibre handgun that were legally obtained and registered.

One hopes that politicians will act with cooler heads than the advocates when it comes to eroding personal rights in the wake of yet another tragedy.

In spite of the over-reaction when Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal's Polytechnique in 1989, it was what police learned about such shootings that saved lives this week, rather than the divisive and costly measures put in place by federal authorities. It was a credit to the first officers on the scene and to their training that they took immediate action to limit the loss of life -- however tragic -- to one innocent woman and Gill.