Marc Lepine Shooting Analysis

Montreal, Quebec, Canada-Twenty-seven years on and The Montreal Massacre still stands as the worst mass shooting in the name of misogyny. Shooter Marc Lepine acted his perverse fantasy to punish all of the feminists by killing fourteen nursing students at The École Polytechnique.

In his suicide note, Lepine rails against feminism and claims that feminists “ruined his life.” He listed the names of 19 area women he intended to kill for the crime of just being feminists.
His attack on The École Polytechnique began in the nursing school. Lepine separated male and female students from each other. He shot nine female students at close range, calling his victims “a bunch of feminists.”

The gunman then roamed the hallways, going into another classroom

and the cafeteria, looking for more women to shoot. In just under twenty minutes, Lepine mowed down an additional twenty-four victims. Fourteen young women lost their lives that day, everyone else would go on to survive their injuries.

Like most mass shooters, Lepine was an unmarried, young man with difficulty committing to a school program or career. His choice of The École Polytechnique was highly personal as the school had twice rejected his applications for lacking the required coursework.

His father was an Algerian businessman who raged against women and beat his mother, a Canadian nurse. After the divorce, his father virtually abandoned the family. His mother was forced to return to her nursing career full-time just to support her two young children.

Marc would only see his mother on the weekends while other families cared for him and his sister during the week. He took his mother's name and resented having Middle Eastern heritage.

Somehow Lepine desired his father’s presence so much, he overcompensated by expanding on his own hatred for women. Instead of coming home and beating his wife the nurse, Lepine went out and killed nurses.