1989 mass shooting in Montreal, Canada
The massacre (), also known as the Montreal massacre, was an antifeminist mass shooting that occurred on December 6, 1989, at the in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Fourteen women were murdered; another ten women and four men were injured.
The perpetrator was 25-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained Ruger Mini-14, 30-round high-capacity magazines, and a hunting knife. He began his rampage at a mechanical engineering class at the , where he separated the male and female students, ordering the men to leave. He shot all nine women in the room, killing six. For nearly 20 minutes the shooter moved through corridors on multiple floors of the building, the cafeteria, and another classroom, targeting women. He wounded more students and killed eight more women before fatally shooting himself. 
The massacre is now widely regarded as an act of misogynist terrorism and representative of wider societal violence against women. The anniversary of the massacre is commemorated annually in Canada as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. The gunman had said he was against feminism; after the attack, Canadians debated various interpretations of the events, their significance, and the shooter's motives. Some interpretations noted that the shooter had been abused as a child, or suggested that the massacre was the isolated act of a madman, unrelated to larger social issues.
Politicians in the House of Commons responded by passing more stringent gun control laws, and officials took other actions to end violence against women. The massacre also led to policy changes in emergency services protocols to shootings; for instance, that police would intervene immediately to try to reduce casualties. These changes were credited with later minimizing casualties during incidents of shooting in Montreal and elsewhere. This was the deadliest mass shooting in Canada until attacks in Nova Scotia more than 30 years later, which resulted in twenty-two deaths.
Timeline.
Sometime after 4 p.m. on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine arrived at the building housing the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, armed with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife. He had legally purchased the gun less than a month earlier on November 21 in a Checkmate Sports store in Montreal, saying that he was going to hunt small game. Investigators learned that he had been in and around the École Polytechnique building at least seven times in the weeks leading up to December 6.
The gunman sat for a while in the office of the registrar on the second floor. He did not speak to anyone, although a staff member asked if she could help him. He left the office and was seen in other parts of the building before he entered a second-floor mechanical engineering class of about sixty students at about 5:10 p.m. After approaching the student giving a presentation, he asked everyone to stop everything and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. No one moved at first, believing it to be a joke, but he fired a shot into the ceiling.
After separating the students, Lépine ordered the estimated fifty men to leave the room. He asked the women whether they knew why they were there; a student asked who he was. He said that he was fighting feminism. One of the students, Nathalie Provost, protested that they were women studying engineering, not feminists fighting against men or marching to prove that they were better. He opened fire on the students, from left to right, killing six—Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie St-Arneault—and wounding three others, including Provost. 
The gunman continued into the second-floor corridor and wounded three students before entering another room where he twice attempted to shoot a female student. When his weapon failed to fire, he entered the emergency staircase and reloaded his gun. He tried to return to the room he had just left, but the students had locked the door. He failed to open it although he fired three shots into the door. 
He shot at other students in the corridor, wounding one, and approached the financial services office. There he shot and killed Maryse Laganière through the window of the door she had just locked.
The gunman went down to the first-floor cafeteria, in which about 100 people were gathered. As he shot nursing student Barbara Maria Klucznick near the kitchens and wounded another student, the crowd scattered. Entering an unlocked storage area at the end of the cafeteria, the gunman shot and killed Anne-Marie Edward and Geneviève Bergeron, who were hiding. He told a male and female student to come out from under a table; they complied and he let them live.
The shooter walked up an escalator to the third floor, where he shot and wounded one female and two male students in the hallway. He entered another classroom and told the men to "get out", shooting and wounding Maryse Leclair, who was giving a presentation at the front of the classroom. He fired on students in the front row, killing Maud Haviernick and Michèle Richard, who were trying to escape the room. Other students dove under their desks. The killer wounded another three female students and killed Annie Turcotte. He changed the 30-round high-capacity magazine in his weapon and moved to the front of the class, shooting in all directions. The wounded Maryse Leclair asked for help; the gunman stabbed her three times with his hunting knife, killing her. He took off his cap, wrapped his coat around his rifle, said, "Oh shit", and killed himself with a shot to the head. It was 20 minutes since he had begun the attack. About 60 unfired cartridges remained in the boxes he carried with him. He had fired about 100 rounds during the shooting.
Emergency services response.
Emergency response to the shootings was harshly criticized for failures to protect the students and staff. Security guards at the École Polytechnique were poorly trained, organized and equipped. Communication issues at the 911 call centre delayed the dispatch of police and ambulances, who were initially routed to incorrect addresses.
The police officers were disorganized and poorly coordinated. They established a perimeter around the building and waited before entering the building. During this period, the gunman killed several women. Three official investigations severely condemned the emergency response. 
Following subsequent changes to emergency response protocols, police handling of the 1992 shootings at Concordia University, the Dawson College shooting in 2006, and the 2014 attack on Parliament hill in Ottawa were generally praised. In these incidents, the police conducted rapid and immediate intervention, and improved coordination amongst emergency response agencies was credited with minimizing the loss of life.
Aftermath.
On December 6, 1989, the Montreal Police director of public relations Pierre Leclair briefed reporters outside the Polytechnique building; when he entered, he found the body of his own daughter Maryse among the dead.
The Quebec and Montreal governments declared three days of mourning. A joint funeral for nine of the women was held at Notre-Dame Basilica on December 11, 1989, and was attended by Governor General Jeanne Sauvé, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, and Montreal mayor Jean Doré, along with thousands of other mourners.
Victims.
Lépine killed fourteen women (twelve engineering students, one nursing student, and one employee of the university) and injured fourteen others, eleven women and three men.
Perpetrator.
Marc Lépine (born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi) was the son of Monique Lépine, a French Canadian former Catholic nun, and an Algerian father, who was a non-practising Muslim. He and his sister Nadia were baptized Catholic but received little instruction. According to the mother in a 2006 article, the father, a mutual funds salesman, did not consider women to be the equal of men. He was physically and verbally abusive to his wife and son, and discouraged tenderness between the two. When Gamil was seven, his parents separated; his father ceased contact with his children soon after. His mother returned to nursing to support the family; because of her schedule, the children lived with other families during the week. 
At age 14, Gamil changed his name to "Marc Lépine", citing his hatred of his father and taking his mother's surname to further separate from the man. He had difficulty as he advanced in school and toward adulthood.
Lépine had attempted to join the Canadian Army during the winter of 1980–1981. According to his 1989 suicide letter found on his body at the attacks, he was rejected because he was "anti-social". 
The brief biography of the shooter that police released the day after the killings described him as intelligent but troubled. He disliked feminists, career women, and women in traditionally-male occupations, such as the police force. He began a pre-university CEGEP (college) program in Pure Sciences in 1982, but switched to a three-year vocational program in electronics technology after his first year. He abandoned this program in his final semester without explanation. Lépine applied to the École Polytechnique in 1986 and in 1989 but lacked two CEGEP courses required for admission. He completed one of them in the winter of 1989.
Suicide letter.
On the day of the massacre, Lépine wrote three letters: two were sent to friends, and one was found in an inside pocket of his jacket. The police revealed some details from the suicide letter in the days after the attack, but did not disclose the full text. 
The media filed an access to information case to compel the police to release the suicide letter but were unsuccessful. A year after the attacks, the three-page statement was leaked to journalist and feminist Francine Pelletier. It contained a list of nineteen Quebec women whom Lépine labeled as "radical feminists" and apparently intended to kill. The list included Pelletier, plus a union leader, a politician, a TV figure, and six police officers who the gunman knew from their playing together on an amateur volleyball team. The letter (without the list of women) was subsequently published in the newspaper "La Presse", where Pelletier was a columnist. 
In the leaked letter, Lépine wrote that he was rational and blamed 'feminists' for ruining his life. He said he was angry at feminists for seeking social changes that "retain the advantages of being women [...] while trying to grab those of the men". He referred to Denis Lortie, a Canadian Armed Forces corporal who had killed three government employees and wounded thirteen others in an armed attack on the National Assembly of Quebec on May 8, 1984. The text of the original letter in French is available, as well as an English translation.
Search for a rationale.
The massacre profoundly shocked Canadians. Government and criminal justice officials feared that extensive public discussion about the massacre would cause pain to the families and lead to more antifeminist violence. As a result, they did not conduct a public inquiry, and did not release Lépine's suicide letter. In addition, although an extensive police investigation into the perpetrator and the killings took place, the resulting report was not made public. The coroner was authorized to have a copy as a source in her investigation. The media, academics, women's organizations, and family members of the victims protested the lack of a public inquiry and paucity of information released.
The gender of the victims, as well as Lépine's oral statements during the massacre and in the suicide note, have resulted in the attack being interpreted as antifeminist and as an example of the wider issue of violence against women in Canadian society. Initially, politicians and the media downplayed the antifeminism angle of the attack. Political leaders such as Robert Bourassa, Claude Ryan, and Jacques Parizeau spoke about "victims" and "youth" rather than "women" or "girls". The television journalist Barbara Frum pleaded against interpreting the massacre as an antifeminist attack or solely violence against women. She asked why people were "diminishing" the tragedy by "suggesting that it was an act against just one group?"
As predicted by the shooter in his suicide letter, some observers believed the event was the isolated act of a madman. A psychiatrist interviewed the gunman's family and friends, and examined his writings as part of the police investigation. He noted that the perpetrator defined suicide as his primary motivation, and that he chose a specific suicide method, namely killing oneself after killing others (multiple homicide/suicide strategy), which is considered a sign of a serious personality disorder.