Coping Skills

Kimveer Gill referred to himself as the 'angel of death' in an online diary. (Canadian Press)

Yet again my beloved Montréal is besieged by a rampaging gunman. At least this time the violence was more or less random, or so it seems at this early stage. It should not surprise anybody, however, that politicians are calling for gun registries, counselling and a host of other quick-or-bureaucratic fixes because, as a Lockheed Martin executive told Michael Moore in Bowling For Columbine when he was asked about the connection between the massacre at that school and the fact that L-M, Littleton's biggest employer, is also the largest weapons manufacturer in the world: "I guess I just don't see that connection." I guess not.

But some people do. Like renegade journalist Greg Palast. In the UK Guardian last year Palast published an article that sums up the whole problem in a formula readily recognizable:

[(Video Games + Movies + Television) + (Guns)]

x

Free Market

=

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Here's a sampling of the Palast perspective:

There are 200 million guns in civilian hands in the United States.... Gun companies dumped several million weapons into outlets in states with few curbs on purchases, super-saturating the legal market so that excess would flow up the "Iron Pipeline" to meet black market demand in New York and other big cities.... Like the company that sells cigarette rolling papers in quantities far outstripping sales of legal tobacco, gun manufacturers have a nod-and-wink understanding of where their products end up. Their market models cannot account for half the gun sales in loose-law states such as Georgia.... Several hundred lawyers - including the Costanza group, the combine of firms that mangled the tobacco industry - filed suits to make sure the gun industry feels our pain. New Orleans was the first of thirty cities in court demanding that gun purveyors pay the cost of gathering the wounded off the streets, and the cost of arming the municipal police force in self-defense. The legal profession might have finally accomplished what a cowering Congress dare not consider: shutting down firearms sales at source.

Is Vancouver's Dana Larsen offering young people an alternative method of coping with the madness they see going on around them every day? It's less violent, that's for sure.