When I arrived at work this morning and checked for inter-office email, there was a message from the university administration advising, faculty, staff and students that university counselling services and chaplaincies were available to help us cope with our shock and grief over the shooting at Dawson College in Montreal yesterday. I deleted this message and was left wondering, what were they thinking? Carleton University is nowhere near where the shooting took place. No one at Carleton University, excepting for the possibility that there may be people with friends and relatives who were at Dawson College during the shooting, was the least bit affected by this. From what I saw today, people were going about their business as usual. It was just another day of classes for the students, and another day of work for the faculty and staff, as well it should be. The shooting at Dawson College is tragic, certainly, for those who were there, and particularly for the families of the dead and injured. A young woman died of her wounds in hospital. The Montreal Police, to their credit, acted decisively in containing and neutralising the miscreant who went on this shooting spree. The carnage was stopped short.

I expect to hear the usual sanctimonious blather about the evils of gun ownership from the anti-gun, anti-hunting, misandrist elements of our society, but so far the response in from editorial writers and politicians is temperate. As a gun owner myself, I am familiar with the anti-gun sentiments expressed by the former. Whenever there is a shooting, we get treated to the same tired old platitudes, hand-wringing and finger pointing, e.g., "the gun lobby is to blame for this", "inadequate gun control is at fault", "this shows what men are capable of", ad nauseam. Fact is that no amount of legislation, prohibitions, whatever, is going to stop people intent on mayhem from doing so. The 9/11 terrorists carried out their attacks, hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into the field in Pennsylvania, armed only with box cutters. At the end of the day, while I sympathize with the friends and families of those who were killed and injured in the shooting at Dawson College, I have no qualms about continuing to own and use my sporting guns for lawful hunting and target shooting.