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While American media grapples with our gun laws, gender relations, and mental health services, publications from around the world are weighing in with their own intelligent or oblivious responses. Whenever there is a mass shooting in America, a foreign paper will wonder why we refuse to change our gun laws. But in Canada, a conservative columnist denied there was anything misogynistic about the UCSB shooting, especially when compared to the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre. Meanwhile Germany's Die Welt wondered how much infamy we should give the shooter at all, and Belgium's De Morgen noticed he was rich.
Canada: Feminists have this all wrong
It's easy to draw comparisons between the tragedy in Isla Vista and the December 6, 1989 massacre at the École Polytechnique, when Marc Lépine entered a classroom, separated the students by gender, and killed nine women. Barbara Kay at Canada's right-leaning National Post, however, rejects that theory, since Rodger also killed three men. It's worth noting that Kay once wrote, "First of all, ours is not a rape culture. If it were, our girls would be walking around in burkas."
"Marc Lepine, the son of an abusive father from a patriarchal culture, hated women, but he represented no cause, no movement, no principle, nothing but his own deeply disturbed self," Kay writes (Lépine's father was Algerian). In Canada, the École Polytechnique shooting led to the sort of gun reform America is unlikely to see, caused by, in Kay's words, "feminism-inspired links between Lepine’s crime and the alleged potential of any male to become a Lepine."