The massacre (French: tuerie de l'École polytechnique), also known as the Montreal massacre, was an antifeminist mass shooting that occurred on December 6, 1989 at the in Montreal, Quebec. Fourteen women were murdered; another ten women and four men were injured.
Perpetrator Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and hunting knife, entered a mechanical engineering class at the . He ordered the women to one side of the classroom, and instructed the men to leave. After claiming that he was "fighting feminism", he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. The shooter then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women, for just under 20 minutes. He killed eight more women before ending his own life. In total, 14 women were killed, and 14 others were injured.
The massacre is now widely regarded as an anti-feminist attack and representative of wider societal violence against women; the anniversary of the massacre is commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. After the attack, Canadians debated various interpretations of the events, their significance, and the shooter's motives. Other interpretations emphasized the shooter's abuse as a child or suggested that the massacre was the isolated act of a madman, unrelated to larger social issues.
The incident led to more stringent gun control laws in Canada, and increased action to end violence against women. It also resulted in changes in emergency services protocols to shootings, including immediate, active intervention by police. These changes were later credited with minimizing casualties during incidents in Montreal and elsewhere. The massacre remained the deadliest mass shooting in Canada until the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks over 30 years later.
Timeline
Sometime after 4 p.m. on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine arrived at the building housing the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, armed with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife. He had purchased the gun less than a month earlier on November 21 in a Checkmate Sports store in Montreal. He had told the clerk that he was going to use it to hunt small game. He had been in and around the École Polytechnique building at least seven times in the weeks leading up to December 6.
The perpetrator first sat in the office of the registrar on the second floor for a while, where he was seen rummaging through a plastic bag. He did not speak to anyone, even when a staff member asked if she could help him. He then left the office and was seen in other parts of the building before entering a second-floor mechanical engineering class of about sixty students at about 5:10 p.m. After approaching the student giving a presentation, he asked everyone to stop everything and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. No one moved at first, believing it to be a joke until he fired a shot into the ceiling.
Lépine then separated the nine women from the approximately fifty men and ordered the men to leave. He asked the women whether they knew why they were there; instead of replying, a student asked who he was. He answered that he was fighting feminism. One of the students, Nathalie Provost, protested that they were women studying engineering, not feminists fighting against men or marching to prove that they were better. He responded by opening fire on the students from left to right, killing six—Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie St-Arneault—and wounding three others, including Provost. Before leaving the room, he wrote the word "shit" twice on a student project.
The gunman continued into the second-floor corridor and wounded three students before entering another room where he twice attempted to shoot a female student. When his weapon failed to fire, he entered the emergency staircase where he was seen reloading his gun. He returned to the room he had just left, but the students had locked the door; he failed to unlock it with three shots fired into the door. Moving along the corridor, he shot at others, wounding one, before moving towards the financial services office, where he shot and killed Maryse Laganière through the window of the door she had just locked.