Canadian MPs improvised spears to fight off shooter while PM Harper hid in the closet

They do have armed security officers, but apparently not enough to fight a battle and provide personal protection to all MPs. Also I can’t imagine them being able to carry their own guns in Parliament.

Not always; but given the speed with which our Cold War era “Continuity of Government” shadow-apparatus of secret executive orders and gigantic bunkers got Really Damn Creepy; and the overt intimidation and suppression that gets ramped up when governments do get serious about crisis planning(ie. the WTO is in town, the RNC/DNC is in town, let’s basically impose martial law for blocks and blocks in all directions); I’m not sure that it’d be such a bad thing if we were more accepting of that approach, especially for problems that (unlike, say, public health, or hydrology) don’t actually have pretty good answers if you would just stop ignoring the scientists for a few minutes…

2 Likes

Historically speaking, a lot of people. Most of them didn’t survive Europe’s golden age of imperial expansion; but many spears were brought to many gunfights in the process.

6 Likes

The adrenaline rushing through the viens of those spear-bearing MPs must have been thick in the room. I wonder who the leader was? Who picked the first spear?

Cory’s choice of a William Golding’s Lord of the Flies photo (from the film) to accompany this article borders on profound. How quick we revert. How little separates us from brute force.

5 Likes

Casey Ryback, “Nah. I’m just a cook.”

“Canadians! Thousands of them!”

7 Likes

Luckily order was restored quickly enough to prevent an outbreak of cannibalism.

5 Likes

The secret bunkers led me earlier to a thought of crowdsourced seismic imaging. Think an array of geophones. Each one is an individual with a seismic microphone in their basement or garden, streaming location-tagged and GPS-timestamped data to an analytic computer. From that, seismic tomography can show what is happening underground even if the building site itself has three layers of barbed wire and shoot-to-kill guards. Just live close enough and you can be one of the eyes to see.

(Same approach can be used for hydrophone arrays in coastal areas. By extension, with some more preprocessing to limit the data volume, with exactly the same approach passive time-of-arrival radar arrays can be crowdsourced from low-cost private nodes for airspace awareness.)

If the govt does not have secret bunkers to hide their sorry arses in, and the pricks it is made from are aware of that, they will have their own necks in the stakes like every other civilian and be less unlikely to actually make an effort to prevent a possible war.

Should they have frozen in place and waited to die, then? Being prepared to defend yourself against clear and present violence isn’t even within sight of Lord-of-the-Flies-style savagery.

Unfortunately they let him back out.

4 Likes

Up here we refer to it as Plan Eh?

7 Likes

I don’t know if spears would have helped, the attacker was familiar with the use of such weapons.

I think it indicates they’re aware there isn’t much you can do about crazy lone wolves without reducing -everyones- freedoms.

Please remain sane, Canada.

7 Likes

It’s not just Canada, it’s Earth.

1 Like

13 out of 15 flagpoles were converted into spears, huh?

Fox News will want to know: WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 2 FLAGPOLES?

It’s a conspiracy, I think.

-jeff

1 Like

Damn right.

As it stood a week ago, you could walk into Parliament Hill without passing through a metal detector. You could do yoga with the leader of the official opposition on the lawn of Parliament Hill in the morning, it is a public place freely open to all.

You don’t need to go through metal detectors or surrender personal belonging or identification to enter tall buildings in Canada. Or City Halls. No one wands you as you enter a public library.

There are plenty of problems in Canada, but “security state” issues are minimal, compared to our neighbour. We’d like to keep it that way & watching out for/challenging the people who will definitely use this & other isolated, statistically insignificant anomalies to try and make us into a police state. They also use international intervention as a cover for changing things at home, a dual wedge tool “People in XX want to attack us & are doing bad things to others, we have to attack them,… oh, and raise security here, in case.”

Fuck them.

10 Likes

As a flagpole is just a pike with a banner on it. I definitely give them credit for the bravery, but not the ‘‘weaponization’’ of what was always a weapon. Plows turn back into swords pretty easily.

2 Likes

Even unmodified plows are decent bludgeoning weapons.

3 Likes

While that is funny, it’s slightly warmer in Ottawa right now, but not unseasonably so. It’s Ottawa, we don’t live in igloos, and I’ve never seen a polar bear. We’ll get snow about mid-November.

Whoosh. It’s just a question, PF. In answer to your question, of course these MPs chose weapons, of course they would do anything to defend themselves, anybody would do this.

Cory’s observation does remain within sight of Golding’s commentary, and my comment is made in that context. Was the Lord of the Flies image mis-chosen? You know it wasn’t. It was meant to provoke thought on the matter.

I am curious how the leadership of our country performed, government or opposition, as the construct of high civilization was swept away by chaos and immanent extinction in that isolated room…the island. Is grabbing a spear a measure of leadership? My gut wants to know how these people meet crisis in general, and unfortunate as it was, this was a kind of test of Canadian leadership…it’s very hard to get a clear idea of this, being cross-modulated through media as all this has been.