Definitely not a “Friday Fun Link” day today with news of a shocking shooting at a school in northern Saskatchewan which killed four people (not five as many early reports stated) with others injured.
Here are some random thoughts…
- Reading online comments, many right wing Americans are calling out Obama for saying “This doesn’t happen in other countries.” Okay, on the most literal level, they’re right – mass shootings *do* happen in Canada and other countries. But when this is the fourth school shooting in Canada since 1975 and the US had FIFTY last year alone, yeah, Obama’s right.
- #laloche is trending on Twitter…unfortunately.
- You don’t realise how remote some northern Saskatchewan communities are – when Shea and I went to the Ness Creek Music Festival in (what felt to us like) “northern” Saskatchewan, we were still five hours south of La Loche. When we went to La Ronge houseboating when I was a kid, that was six hours from La Loche. When we went to Jan Lake fishing a couple years ago, that was ten hours from La Loche (although those last two examples are partly because you have to travel east to west as well to get between these remote centres.)
- Reddit has a few threads about La Loche on sub-Reddits as varied as r/Saskatchewan, r/Canada (which is the most active, by far), r/CanadaGuns, r/Conservative and even r/conspiracy.
- In terms of what causes someone to do this, it’s probably a number of factors. But the way that Aboriginal people are marginalized and still suffer from historic injustices is definitely a big part of it.
- A shooting like this gets a ton of attention but apparently the suicide rate in this community (not to mention levels of violence and addiction) is extremely high as well but that gets very little attention.