the blog quebecois

Following the school shooting in Montreal, the gun-control lobby is gleeful that their stupid, expensive, unworkable long-gun registry might be saved.

Ian Robinson reminds us of one central driving factor behind it:

The entire gun control and registry debate in this country is, and always has been, based on an individual case, that of the slaughter of 14 female students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 by another loser with a grudge.

And it has been a debate that has demonstrated a barely concealed hostility toward men in general and male firearms owners in particular.

In Canada, gun control wasn't a public policy issue, it became -- thanks to the 1989 massacre with a male perpetrator and female victims -- part of the nation's ongoing gender wars and was framed in precisely those terms.

Thanks largely to Wendy Cukier, the glamour-puss at left. Cukier at the time was described as a professor of "Human Ecology," at least according to my memory. (Her present c.v. doesn't mention it -- she's now in "Information Technology," or at least the aspects of it that impinge on, especially, "gender.") I have no idea what "Human Ecology" is, but I think it's what sociologists claimed to be experts on when "Sociology" became an official term of ridicule.

At any rate, I was listening to an open-line radio interview with her when a caller phoned in and asked what qualified her as an expert on guns.

In full dudgeon, she said, and I repeat in full:

"I. Am. A. Professor."

Well! That settles it.

I suppose I once would have once been impressed by that. When I was twelve years old, maybe.

If the Boomers taught us nothing else, at least they taught us to distrust Authority.