Gazette Column: Police should have been alerted: SQ

Gazette Column: Police should have been alerted: SQ
Date: Sep 18, 2006 9:09 AM
PUBLICATION: Montreal Gazette
DATE: 2006.09.17
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PAGE: A4
BYLINE: HUBERT BAUCH
SOURCE: The Gazette
WORD COUNT: 665

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A lesson to be learned: Take people like Kimveer Gill at their word:
Police should have been alerted: SQ. School shootings usually planned,
experts say

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The best that could come from the Dawson College horror, is - as Premier
Jean Charest said - that lessons can be learned to prevent its
recurrence.

One of those lessons, it's been suggested, is to take people like
rampage shooter Kimveer Gill more seriously, to take them at their word,
and to turn them in before they act on their lethal fantasies.

"The people around him who knew he had firearms should have alerted the
police," said Surete du Quebec chief Normand Proulx. "You can't wait
for
an event like this to happen to say you've known he could do something
like this.

"I would prefer that we receive more alerts as opposed to people being
in doubt and doing nothing at all."

It seems a sensible conclusion in light of the ample warning of Gill's
murderous proclivities that he provided on his Internet blog - his
musings about turning the world into a graveyard, crushing those who
stood in his way, leaving a river of blood in his wake and walking
through it with pride.

His avowed gun lust, his swaggering poses with his arsenal, his
addiction to video games depicting mass murder and his yearning for one
"so realistic it looks and feels like it's actually happening," his
dream of dying young and leaving a mangled corpse.

These are clear warning signs of a dangerously disturbed personality and
Gill was actually typical of youthful rampage killers in putting out
those warnings.

Along with harbouring a death wish, they also yearn for attention and
want some credit for what they see as the crowning act of their wretched
lives while they're still around.

Experts who have studied school shootings have found that they are
typically planned over a period of months, and that the perpetrators
tend to sow a trail of hints, if not direct warnings as to their
intentions.

Sometimes they are picked up on, as in the case of the school bombing
plot by two 17-year-olds in Green Bay, Wis., that was foiled on Friday
after a fellow student got wind of it and alerted authorities.

Sometimes they're not, as in the case of Kimveer Gill.

The problem in Gill's case, and in that of many others who share his
proclivities, is that there was no direct threat in his online rantings,
or indication that Dawson was his target. And it would have been pure
fluke, on a par with hitting the Super 7 two weeks running, for the
police to have nailed Gill in the infinity of cyberspace.

Presumably there were people who read his blog, perhaps even with some
alarm. But it's a big step from there to calling the cops. There is,
after all, a lot of this stuff out there and if the police were to
devote themselves to investigating even a fraction of delusional misfits
with violent fantasies, bikers and bank robbers could run free.

Counting on citizen participation in the identification of potential
mass killers is estimable, but also fraught with complications.

A lot of people don't take Internet threats seriously, said Rose-Marie
Charest, president of Quebec's Ordre des psychologues.

"We trivialize what's written on the Internet, as if it were a virtual
reality. They are as important as threats made verbally over the
telephone."

The people most likely to have read Gill's blog would tend to be the
same sort of alienated fringers with a penchant for demented fantasies.
It's a fair bet that cops rank high on their hate lists and they'd thus
be unlikely to sic the police on one of their own.

But even in "normal" society among people with a functional sense of
civic responsibility there is a reluctance to go to the police with
suspicions about someone. In many cases, the warnings are vague and it's
hard to connect the dots between the signals and the eventual
consequence.

Some people are only too happy to inform to the police, but there is
also a widespread social opprobrium against "snitching" or "ratting,"
particularly among young people.

There is the reflex reluctance to get involved, which is generally
regarded as a prevalently urban phenomenon.

But there have also been school shooting rampages in small towns where
everybody knows everybody and, by and large, everybody's business.

Recognition of what constitutes a clearly present danger, and overcoming
the inclination to let it be someone else's responsibility is the
challenge to society posed by the Dawson incident and others like it.