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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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121889
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12188900.035
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1990-09-19
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WORLD, Page 30CANADAThe Man Who Hated WomenA sick obsession ignites the country's worst mass killing
It was the last hour of fall-term classes at the University of
Montreal's engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique. Students
faced eleven days of exams, but at least they could look forward
to the cheering prospect of Christmas vacation afterward. That tidy
calendar was suddenly and tragically shattered last week in a hail
of semiautomatic rifle fire ignited by a bizarre sexual hatred.
When the climactic hour ended, Canada had suffered the worst mass
murder in its history.
The bloodshed began shortly after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, when
Marc Lepine, 25, an unemployed electronics buff who once aspired
to study at the engineering school, arrived at the hilltop campus
building. Armed with a hunting knife and a .223-cal. Ruger rifle
manufactured in the U.S., Lepine climbed to the second-floor
corridor and shot a woman student dead. Then, a carefree grin on
his face, he entered the mechanical-engineering class of Professor
Yvon Bouchard, where a student was in the midst of presenting his
term project. "I want the women!" cried Lepine, ordering female
students to one side of the room and men into the hall. "We thought
it was a joke," said Bouchard. They learned otherwise when the
gunman pumped several rounds into the ceiling. Shouting, "You're
all a bunch of feminists!" to his women hostages, Lepine opened
fire, killing six on the spot.
Proceeding on his mad mission, Lepine went down to the
first-floor cafeteria, where he killed three more women, then up
to the third floor, where he gunned down four others. Besides the
14 women killed, 13 people, four of them men, were wounded. Finally
the attacker turned the weapon on himself, blowing away part of his
head.
In Lepine's pocket, police found a three-page suicide note, in
which police said he complained that "feminists have always ruined
his life." Born to a French-Canadian mother and an Algerian father
who left the family when his son was seven, Lepine studied
intermittently at junior colleges and expressed the hope that he
would be accepted at the university. Though he had no history of
criminal behavior or mental illness, he existed on the margins; a
loner who enjoyed war movies, he was unable to sustain
relationships with women and claimed to have been turned down by
the military for being "asocial."
Lepine purchased the rifle, a model that is popular with
ranchers for killing coyotes, at a local gun store three weeks ago,
after undergoing a police-file check as required by law. Canada
regulates the sale of handguns much more strictly than does the
U.S., but hunting guns, including semiautomatics, are widely
obtainable. In the wake of last week's misogynic massacre, there
were calls for tighter rules on the availability of combat-style
weapons as well as soul-searching debates about the victimization
of women. But the most touching commentary involved very few words.
After a candlelight procession to the university, some 1,500 women
and men sat silently in a Montreal chapel, the quiet broken only
by the occasional hymn.