So terribly sad to think that our beautiful city of Ottawa is not immune to this sort of violence. It’s a sad day, a loss of innocence. My thoughtfelt prayers go out to the family of the brave soldier shot and killed at the National War Memorial. May a tragedy like this never be repeated on Canadian soil =(
I am just reeling.
We’ve had a Canadian Forces soldier run down, dead babies in a goddamn storage locker, and now gunfire in Parliament.
I love my country, and hope it gets well soon.
I’m not sure about innocence lost. Those who lived through the October Crisis may feel it’s been gone a while. I hope we get the opportunity to build a better nation from this, not engage in a high-handed response or act to increase divisiveness.
There’s nothing wrong with your country. It’s a few bad things out of a millions of people and their millions of mundane and civil interactions everyday. There has always been bad things. Now with the internet you can be aware of ALL of them in living color.
A friend of mine works a couple blocks from Parliament. He said he went out around lunch time to walk around his building and it was a ghost town. Apparently some news source he was listening to (is there Fox News in Canada??) referred to it as Canada’s 9/11, which he felt was being a bit dramatic…
I told him I agreed, unless they were referring to the beginning of the government taking away rights and freedoms and a move toward a police state.
In all seriousness, of course, any loss of innocent life is tragic, especially in a country where it doesn’t seem to happen as often as it does here. But like someone else mentioned, probably something that, just a few years ago, you might have never heard many details of it until all the information was gathered, and your mind could not speculate…
That was +40 years ago. I think some would consider that a generation ago. If they were 20s at that time they’d be 60s now.
Still yea, I getch ya. Innocence gone awhile ago.
Also note, although still early the Western part of Canada’s response now differs compared to back then. Government buildings closed with little questions asked, while back then the deployment of military personnel was ridiculed.
What was that reporter with the camera thinking?
This is so true , also applies to many other areas of life as well.
He was thinking about recording footage of the unfolding situation, the task he was assigned.
I was on my way to downtown Ottawa to buy supplies. Needless to say my plans changed rather quickly. I didn’t hear the 9/11 comparison but I did hear several descriptions to this incident as being a “highly planned Mumbai-style attack”, refering to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, which I though was hyperbolic as well. While the death of the young soldier is extremely sad and tragic and the stint in the Parliament was scary and brazen, it doesn’t compare in scale to the 164 dead and siege of several buildings by a dozen gunmen in Mumbai.
At the moment, I’m looking forward to know whether there was indeed another shooter who remains on the run, of whether this information was erroneous. It seems the police/media are more and more doubtful about this particulat detail. Either way, stay safe, Ottawa peeps.
Who the hell attacks a War Memorial?
I can’t think of a better way to turn people against anything you stand for than employing violence against a moment whose entire purpose is to remind us of the value of peace, and the horrors we humans visit upon ourselves when we let our passions lead us to violence and conflict.
He was assigned the task of recording footage of this unfolding situation? Really? I’d love to know what media organizations task their reporters of recording shootings within seconds, and equip them with mobile phones for doing so.
Loss of innocence? We’ve had residential schools, the aforementioned October Crisis, the Montreal Massacre, Bernardo & Homolka, Robert Pickton, and all sorts of other things that probably speak more towards Canada’s collective cultural innocence than an incident like this.
The issuance of prayers over something like this also strikes me as a relatively un-Canadian, American, response… or maybe I’ve just become more accustomed to interpreting these as literal, religious prayers after living in the US. (I was listening to CNN earlier and they had a Canadian politician on the line saying “thank God” the gunman hadn’t been able to make it into Parliament proper, and I was struck how in the US this would be interpreted as a religious statement whereas in Canada I would interpret it as a rote expression without any intended—or received—religious overtones.)
Terrible Headline. Gun violence and social unrest minimized into “incredible footage”.
I’ll repeat this tweet from Ottawa mayor Jim Watson to put this in perspective
Ottawa mayor @JimWatsonOttawa underlines this is only the fifth murder in Ottawa this year. #OttawaShooting
For those not in Canada. you may be rubbing your eyes. Yes, October of the year. our 5th (fifth) murder of the year. Does the shock and horror of todays incident begin to make a wee bit more sense?
I realize many other “bad” things have happened in Canada. But never before has a soldier been killed at our National War Memorial. Never before has an armed person run into the Parliament building and been shot dead. So, yes, it’s a new era upon us. That before the shooting and killing of the gunman and now the aftermath where things will be much more strict. We will see machine gun armed policemen now visible outside our Parliament buildings. We will be more on guard than before this incident. So pooh-pooh my idea of a loss of innocence all you want. Things will change now.
Is an armed soldier being killed while on duty at a memorial worse than the kidnapping and killing of a politician as happened during the October Crisis? That was certainly something that had never happened before. Do you think that this loss of innocence is going to have more drastic consequences than the War Measures Act?
Would Canada still be innocent if a gunman simply highjacked a bus, took hostages, went to Parliament, and fired shots, as happened in 1989? Or would we still be innocent simply because he wasn’t shot and killed inside the building?
Would we still be innocent if someone went to the National Assembly in Quebec and shot three government employees dead? Or would we still be innocent because these people weren’t killed at a War Memorial?
Dude, you’re right but don’t pick on people.
I just keep reminding people of this: Crazy people commit crimes all the time for a variety of reasons. A person is at a far higher risk of dying from a litany of everyday activities than from dying or even being injured in a terrorist attack.
Let’s not give these people the pleasure of knowing they’re instilling fear. Instead you tell them that their ideology is bullshit, their god is a farce and if they knew what a lot of virgins looked like then they wouldn’t be hoping to be martyred. Most of all, I.S. toolbags and fundamentalist idiots need to realise this: we have remote control planes that we can and will use to kill you from the comfort of our own countries. Your adorable black flag won’t fly over anything we don’t want to allow it to.
That’s the problem. Prudent and “common sense” solutions won’t stop all of the crazies out there. Only totalitarianism will. That is why Saddam et al may have been horrible dictators, but they kept factions within their country from killing each other.
