A man, not a movement or a country, opened fire in Quebec last night
If you’re like me, you spent an hour laying awake in bed last night, checking Twitter for breaking news on the shooting at the Parti Québécois victory party. And if you’ve ever done that sort of thing, you know how frustrating it can be to get your news from Twitter.
Often, of course, it’s a blessing. Whenever Steve Paikin is on the scene, for example, you’re bound to get some in-depth and pragmatic live coverage. And because the shooting took place at an already newsworthy gathering, we were lucky enough to get a lot of this sort of firsthand coverage from plenty of journalists – often with the caveat that the story was still breaking, and that any early reports should be taken with a grain of salt.
For every journalist on the scene, however, there were plenty of pundits and commentators from afar. While the journalists were racing to confirm reports, everyone else was busy muddying the waters, interjecting opinions, and dragging us further and further away from the facts. And I don’t mean to judge, because I probably did my share of it last night, and now I’m doing it again.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and this isn’t going to be a long, rambling post explaining why Twitter won’t replace journalism. It won’t, of course, but this is just one of the many reasons why.
A shooting like this is obviously horrible and unacceptable. The fact that an evidently disturbed man opened fire in public, killing at least one person, is and ought to be the main issue. Inevitably, though, an event like this is bound to become a platform for other issues, and many points of view.
Within minutes, for example, people were talking about the French and English divide. People were calling for more gun control, and arguing that this sort of thing would have been much worse if it had happened in the States. I even saw a guy tweet “This is the fucking problem with polarizing your politics so intensely,” and come on, dude, of course it’s not.
Most of all, and not without reason, people were worried about the tense situation in Quebec and the future of democracy in Canada. People quite rightly said that we don’t express our political discontent with violence. Canadians, they said, don’t do this sort of thing.
The good news, of course, is that “Canadians” didn’t shoot anybody last night. The shooting was the work of one specific Canadian, whose actions don’t represent our values or culture, and we’d do well to keep that in mind if we’re worried about exacerbating political tensions.
Now, I don’t want to be the guy who blindly calls “isolated incident” on a shooting like this in the hope of calming the response. That’s what does tend to happen in the States, and too often it’s done in what are clearly cases of organized terrorism. The motivations for this shooting aren’t yet clear, however, and the early signs point to severe mental illness, not violent political uprising.
No matter what, there’s going to be plenty of hand wringing in the media this week – and on Twitter, of course – about what this means for our democracy. But the great thing about democracy, so they say, is that we get to choose what it means.
If the media wants to sensationalize this shooting, then we get to let them know what we think of that. If the government wants to widen the divide between the people and their representatives with increased security and fear mongering, then we get to let them know we won’t support it. And if anyone wants to argue that the character and dignity of our democracy have been compromised by this shooting, then we get to prove them wrong.
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