Today, December 6, is Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Every year on this day, Canada commemorates a terrible act of violence directed at women solely because of their gender.
L’Ecole Polytechnique is an engineering school affiliated with the Universite de Montreal. On December 6, 1989, a deranged gunman named Marc Lepine entered L’Ecole Polytechnique. He went into a mechanical engineering classroom, ordered the men to leave the room. He asked the female students if they knew why they were there, and told them it was because he was “fighting feminism”. He told them that they were women studying to be engineers, that that made them feminists, and that he hated feminists. He then shot every one of the nine female students. Six were killed. Continue reading
