Kimveer Gill and the Limits of Responsibility

When Kimveer Gill shot up Dawson College in Montreal this week, killing one 18 year old woman, putting two others at death's door, and wounding a total of 19 before shooting himself fatally, he was carrying a lot of baggage. Whatever dark energy was driving him, it drew him into Goth culture, the buying of big guns, the playing of morbid video games (what idiot was allowed to write a game based on the Columbine Massacre let alone be allowed to market it?) and endless paranoid searching of the Internet looking for material to feed his anger at the world.

Meanwhile, about 200 miles east of where I live, a young man justified shooting and killing three people after a party on the grounds that he was so intoxicated that he could not be held responsible for what he did. He was convicted of murder, but his lawyer is appealing.

You think I am now going to launch into a rant about responsibility, insisting that all of us must bear our own burden for what we do, instead of blaming someone or something else. But, as enticing and potentially true as that might be, I'm not ready to go completely down that road. You see, none of us are truly free. We may set a course for ourselves, but we're always influenced by who we are, our past experiences, our loves, our hates. The idea of total freedom of choice is some illusion of some dreamer, not the reality of our daily lives.

Was Kimveer Gill free when he shot up the students of Dawson College? Not by a long shot. He was a driven man, hounded by his hatred of the world, ensnared by the games he played and the mythologies they created. So was he not responsible?

This is where it gets complicated. Suppose that, for arguments' sake, I were to convince you that you are a total slave of your heredity, your past, the things that drive you. Now let me ask you if there was ever a time in your life when you felt tempted to do or say something really bad, and you knew you could resist it and do the right thing...but you did the bad thing anyway. You could argue that you thought you were free to choose good over bad, but you weren't. Yet you know you're not a zombie, that somewhere there is a glimmer of some element of control over your actions, otherwise all of us would always give into whatever served our own interests.

We human beings continue to help others when it does not bring us personal benefit. We continue to be concerned for victims of disasters thousands of miles away. We continue to make at least some good choices that are not nearly as pleasurable as the choices we might have made.

Kimveer Gill was a driven man, but he did not have to go to Dawson College with three guns and start shooting. For that choice, he is responsible.