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Notorious Lives

Baruch Goldstein

Charles Whitman.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Marc Lépine

by David B. Kopel

Canadian mass murderer

Cause of notoriety: Lépine, fueled by an antisocial personality and a hatred of feminists, murdered fourteen people during a shooting rampage at a university engineering school.

Active: December 6, 1989

Locale: École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Early Life

Marc Lépine (lay-PEEN) was born as Gamil Rodrigue Gharbi in 1964. His father, Rachid Liass Gharbi—an alcoholic, abusive immigrant from Algeria—often said that women were slaves who should serve men. His wife, Monique, was a Québécois nurse and former nun. Rachid frequently beat his two children so severely that they bled from the ears and nose. The couple separated when Gamil was seven and were divorced in 1976. Gamil later changed his name to Marc Lépine, adopting his mother’s maiden surname.

The constant abuse as a child likely contributed to Lépine’s eventually forming an antisocial personality, a trait that caused the Canadian Armed Forces to refuse his enlistment. He was also rejected by the École Polytechnique (the University of Montreal’s engineering school) and was fired from a menial job in a kitchen. A narcissist, Lépine blamed feminism for his failures and admired Denis Lortie, who had murdered three people in the Quebec National Assembly in 1984.

Criminal Career

On December 6, 1989, Lépine entered a classroom of the École Polytechnique. Speaking French, he said, “I hate feminists” and began killing people, first in the classroom and then throughout the building. He murdered thirteen people with his gun and one with a dagger; other men and women were wounded.

After seventeen minutes of killing, Lépine turned the gun on himself. A suicide letter found in his pocket expressed his hatred of feminists and listed nineteen Québécois “radical feminists” whom he had thought about murdering. Although the police arrived in the middle of the attack, they waited outside for fifteen minutes until Lépine was confirmed dead. Lépine used a Ruger Mini-14 self-loading rifle. According to the report of coroner Teresa Sourer, the particular model of rifle was unimportant, because any standard hunting rifle “probably would have had similar results.”

Impact

Misogyny in Algerian culture was a taboo topic in public debate, although Marc Lépine’s crime opened to criticism the cultural treatment of women. Many feminists argued that Lépine’s crime was directed at all women and that all men were collectively guilty because masculinity fosters violence against women. Following cries for more stringent gun control, Minister of Justice Doug Lewis initially stated, “You cannot legislate against insanity.” However, the Progressive-Conservative government soon began promoting gun control and in 1992 finally defeated grassroots opposition, enacting a restrictive gun law, Bill C-17.

In 1995, the new Liberal government, appealing especially to urban females by attempting to legislate against the masculine gun-and-hunting culture, passed an even more stringent law, which included mandates that all gun owners’ homes are subject to unannounced, warrantless police inspections and that gun license applications may be vetoed by the applicant’s former girlfriends. A government database of all firearms and their owners was also created. However, Canadian political analysts noted that a backlash against gun control likely helped Stephen Harper and his new Conservative Party oust the Liberals in the 2006 election for the leadership of the country. Since the crime, December 6 has become an annual National Day of Mourning in Canada.

Further Reading

1 

Buckner, H. Taylor. Sex and Guns: Is Gun Control Male Control? Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 5, 1994. http://www.tbuckner.com/. Using a discussion of the Lépine case as part of his survey and analysis of Canadian college students who advocate gun control, the author concludes that pro-gun-control students knew very little about existing gun laws or lawful uses of firearms and favored gun control as a means of controlling male violence or sexuality or of expressing “politically correct” attitudes.

2 

Eglin, Peter, and Stephen Hester. The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis. Waterloo, Iowa: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. Although laden with sociological jargon and the authors’ praises of ethnomethodological interpretation, the book is useful for its many newspaper excerpts following the Lépine crime, such as the minister who said he was ashamed to be a male, and the arguments that college panty raids are part of the male culture of murder.

3 

Malette, Louise, and Marie Chalouh, eds. The Montreal Massacre. Translated by Marlene Wildeman. Charlottetown, P.E.I.: gynergy books, 1991. Outraged Quebec feminists, following the Lépine shooting, demand the rehabilitation of males, whose misogynist death culture is based on aggressive sports, violent entertainment, and the penetration of women during sexual intercourse.

4 

Mauser, Gary. “Evaluating Canada’s 1995 Firearms Legislation.” Journal on Firearms and Public Policy 17 (2005): 1-20. Criminologist argues that the 1995 law was symbolic and did not improve public safety.

5 

Rathjen, Heidi, and Charles Montpetit. December 6: From the Montreal Massacre to Gun Control—The Inside Story. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 1999. Presents the story of Rathjen, who was a student at Polytechnique during the Lépine attack and who cofounded the Coalition for Gun Control, a group that became an influential national and international voice for prohibition of almost all firearms.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Kopel, David B. "Marc Lépine." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1360.
APA 7th
Kopel, D. B. (2007). Marc Lépine. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Kopel, David B. "Marc Lépine." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.