Gunman shoots soldier in Ottawa, shots fired in Parliament

[rommelrommel]

Rifles aren't loaded and also have the BCG removed, just for the record.

 

[Jaskalas]

Man with 'Islamic extremist leanings' attacks NY police

^ This reaches people. The counterbalance? Not so much.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

For anyone interested in seeing how Canada honours our military members killed in service, the soldier killed in this incident is being taken home along our "Highway of Heroes" which has been lined for hundreds of kilometers by tens of thousands of Canadians.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cpl-nathan-cirillo-making-his-final-journey-home-1.2069186

Some live coverage and stories all along the route.



NBC did a nice piece a few years ago on how this, tradition for lack of a better word, began.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc6t6HLt7vA

 

[KMFJD]

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/we-need-less-security-not-more/

'Even as events still unfolded in a confused downtown, the pressure on officials and politicians to “fix” security, to ensure this could never happen again, began to mount. But how could you ever truly prevent something like this? A mentally ill man, enflamed with the zeal of a new mania, running amok with a gun? You simply can’t.

You could build higher fences around Parliament Hill. But then the next one will shoot up a parade. You could put a rifle on every street corner. Yet the next one will use a grenade. You could pat down everyone coming into Downtown Ottawa. Then the next one will attack Rideau Hall.

It is hard to say and harder to accept. But there is nothing you can do to stop the fanatic. Eavesdrop on everyone? Read all our email? Bug every mosque? Armoured police vans? More metal detectors? We have seen this. And all of it, ultimately, is just as ineffective as the thin, fluttering yellow police tape which appeared overnight across Ottawa.'

He makes some good points.

 

[Iron Woode]

For anyone interested in seeing how Canada honours our military members killed in service, the soldier killed in this incident is being taken home along our "Highway of Heroes" which has been lined for hundreds of kilometers by tens of thousands of Canadians.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cpl-nathan-cirillo-making-his-final-journey-home-1.2069186

Some live coverage and stories all along the route.



NBC did a nice piece a few years ago on how this, tradition for lack of a better word, began.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc6t6HLt7vA

also our Remembrance Day ceremonies are a stirring sight.

I wish the user Alone was still posting here. He is in the Canadian Forces.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

also our Remembrance Day ceremonies are a stirring sight.

I wish the user Alone was still posting here. He is in the Canadian Forces.

Yeah this year won't be the same. My daughters cadet unit has cancelled a number of uniformed events at the direction of Ottawa. These two events really have them spooked.

 

[Jaskalas]

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/we-need-less-security-not-more/

'Even as events still unfolded in a confused downtown, the pressure on officials and politicians to “fix” security, to ensure this could never happen again, began to mount. But how could you ever truly prevent something like this? A mentally ill man, enflamed with the zeal of a new mania, running amok with a gun? You simply can’t.

No we cannot.

Yet we can minimize it. By coming together we can help identify those who are sick and looking for violence. But we can only do that together. If anyone supported his violence, it greatly impairs our ability to identify it before it happens.

 

[Imp]

For anyone interested in seeing how Canada honours our military members killed in service, the soldier killed in this incident is being taken home along our "Highway of Heroes" which has been lined for hundreds of kilometers by tens of thousands of Canadians.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cpl-nathan-cirillo-making-his-final-journey-home-1.2069186

Some live coverage and stories all along the route.

NBC did a nice piece a few years ago on how this, tradition for lack of a better word, began.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc6t6HLt7vA

To be fair, the "Highway of Heroes" is just Highway 401.

It was designated as such because it was the route taken from CFB Trenton east of Toronto to Toronto. CFB Trenton was the main air force base where flights from Afghanistan that carried deceased military personnel landed. From there, they were driven to the coroner's office in Toronto.

In this case, I don't know if they're going to the coroner's office, but one of the most direct routes on a major highway from Ottawa to Hamilton, the home of the deceased, involves taking Highway 401.

P.S. It's insightful that the soldier killed in Ottawa is getting so much more attention than the one murdered in Quebec.

 

[Imp]

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/we-need-less-security-not-more/

'Even as events still unfolded in a confused downtown, the pressure on officials and politicians to “fix” security, to ensure this could never happen again, began to mount. But how could you ever truly prevent something like this? A mentally ill man, enflamed with the zeal of a new mania, running amok with a gun? You simply can’t.

I found this article interesting too:

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/on-a-multitude-of-shots-inside-parliament/

Still unclear who put down the shooter. And we haven't heard as much about the others who tried to stop him once he got in the building.

 

[Victorian Gray]

An article in one of the local Vancouver papers that I think brings out some important issues:

"No new terror laws will protect us from a disturbed drug addict interpreting messages on the Internet as commands to go forth and commit murder with a hunting rifle.

Especially one who had been in and out of custody, cleared by a Surrey Pre-Trial Centre psychiatrist and released by a B.C. judge with a (hopefully ironic), “Good luck to you, sir.”

The “Attack on Canada” wasn’t 9/11. Equally scary and equally traumatic in some ways, especially if you were caught anywhere near the Parliament Hill shooting.

But Wednesday’s tragedy exposed not so much a failure of our security forces as the gaping holes in our appallingly frayed social safety net.
Homeless and troubled, Montreal-born Michael Zehaf-Bibeau knew he wasn’t coping, sought assistance, begged from the sounds of it; no one listened closely enough.

During his adult life, we spent a small fortune in two provinces providing the 32-year-old with plenty of “due process” and stretches of free room and board at Her Majesty’s motels.

But we didn’t help him and, if anything, the legal system only exacerbated his frustrations.

The vast amount of tax money devoted to his petty crimes would have been far better spent providing him with appropriate psychiatric and social care.

We have two other nearly identical people sitting in jail awaiting trial accused of attempting a copycat Boston Marathon pressure-cooker bomb attack in Victoria on Canada Day 2013. They, too, seem more sad sack than Satanic.

These incidents are examples not of Muslim extremism but of the lack of community support for the dysfunctional of any faith who, with a lack of proper attention or the wrong catalyst, become dangerous.

Amid the noise and chaos of the Web, is it any wonder they can find inspiration, be it from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, white supremacists or Charlie Manson?

Our police, courts and prisons regularly fail to protect us from the truly menacing even when they have dealt with them.

Who can forget the innocent Metro Vancouver teen murdered so recently by a man labelled a high-risk to rape and kill who was supposedly being “monitored”?

At the same time, the legal authorities fail to separate out those who aren’t so much in need of incarceration as requiring housing, social and psychiatric aid.

That’s partly because they’re not trained or mandated to do that, but also there are few services or enough safe havens for the addled, disturbed or unstable.

Still, instead of being sounded as a wake-up call for more investment in social housing and better support programs, Zehaf-Bibeau’s mad suicidal murder dash is being used as proof we need new surveillance tools — more Big Brother measures.

How would a beefed-up national spying apparatus have helped here? Or address the problem of alienated, emotionally incendiary and often addicted Canadians?

A vagabond committing petty crimes, dulling himself with crack, behaving erratically at a Burnaby mosque, apparently irking even fellow denizens of the Vancouver Salvation Army shelter, Zehaf-Bibeau might as well have taken out a billboard proclaiming “I am in crisis.”

He still wasn’t receiving any help.

This is no fifth column; these people are hiding out in the open.
They alienate their families, they annoy the rest of us, they are labelled anti-social for good reasons.

They are lying asleep on sidewalks in the morning when we go to work and at night they occupy street corners raving about their torments — harmless, usually.

We can change our approach and begin to help them or we can curtail civil liberties and invest in more cops, metal detectors, fences and listening equipment.

I know which approach would make me feel safer, what I would call real security measures: a social safety net that caught those in obvious need before they went postal, people like Zehaf-Bibeau."

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion...veals+gaping+holes+social/10322590/story.html

 

[werepossum]

Rifles aren't loaded and also have the BCG removed, just for the record.

That's just insane.

An article in one of the local Vancouver papers that I think brings out some important issues:

"No new terror laws will protect us from a disturbed drug addict interpreting messages on the Internet as commands to go forth and commit murder with a hunting rifle.

Especially one who had been in and out of custody, cleared by a Surrey Pre-Trial Centre psychiatrist and released by a B.C. judge with a (hopefully ironic), “Good luck to you, sir.”

The “Attack on Canada” wasn’t 9/11. Equally scary and equally traumatic in some ways, especially if you were caught anywhere near the Parliament Hill shooting.

But Wednesday’s tragedy exposed not so much a failure of our security forces as the gaping holes in our appallingly frayed social safety net.
Homeless and troubled, Montreal-born Michael Zehaf-Bibeau knew he wasn’t coping, sought assistance, begged from the sounds of it; no one listened closely enough.

During his adult life, we spent a small fortune in two provinces providing the 32-year-old with plenty of “due process” and stretches of free room and board at Her Majesty’s motels.

But we didn’t help him and, if anything, the legal system only exacerbated his frustrations.

The vast amount of tax money devoted to his petty crimes would have been far better spent providing him with appropriate psychiatric and social care.

We have two other nearly identical people sitting in jail awaiting trial accused of attempting a copycat Boston Marathon pressure-cooker bomb attack in Victoria on Canada Day 2013. They, too, seem more sad sack than Satanic.

These incidents are examples not of Muslim extremism but of the lack of community support for the dysfunctional of any faith who, with a lack of proper attention or the wrong catalyst, become dangerous.

Amid the noise and chaos of the Web, is it any wonder they can find inspiration, be it from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, white supremacists or Charlie Manson?

Our police, courts and prisons regularly fail to protect us from the truly menacing even when they have dealt with them.

Who can forget the innocent Metro Vancouver teen murdered so recently by a man labelled a high-risk to rape and kill who was supposedly being “monitored”?

At the same time, the legal authorities fail to separate out those who aren’t so much in need of incarceration as requiring housing, social and psychiatric aid.

That’s partly because they’re not trained or mandated to do that, but also there are few services or enough safe havens for the addled, disturbed or unstable.

Still, instead of being sounded as a wake-up call for more investment in social housing and better support programs, Zehaf-Bibeau’s mad suicidal murder dash is being used as proof we need new surveillance tools — more Big Brother measures.

How would a beefed-up national spying apparatus have helped here? Or address the problem of alienated, emotionally incendiary and often addicted Canadians?

A vagabond committing petty crimes, dulling himself with crack, behaving erratically at a Burnaby mosque, apparently irking even fellow denizens of the Vancouver Salvation Army shelter, Zehaf-Bibeau might as well have taken out a billboard proclaiming “I am in crisis.”

He still wasn’t receiving any help.

This is no fifth column; these people are hiding out in the open.
They alienate their families, they annoy the rest of us, they are labelled anti-social for good reasons.

They are lying asleep on sidewalks in the morning when we go to work and at night they occupy street corners raving about their torments — harmless, usually.

We can change our approach and begin to help them or we can curtail civil liberties and invest in more cops, metal detectors, fences and listening equipment.

I know which approach would make me feel safer, what I would call real security measures: a social safety net that caught those in obvious need before they went postal, people like Zehaf-Bibeau."

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion...veals+gaping+holes+social/10322590/story.html

COULD you have helped him? Seems to me that by diverting even more of people's work product into redistribution you could help some people, but you'll just enable the others to better arm themselves.

 

[Imp]

That's just insane.

They're ceremonial... They're there as a sign of respect between the hours of 9pm to 5pm and not year round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_War_Memorial_(Canada)
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/war-memorial-guard-program-is-designed-for-dignity

And it looks like they only started posting guards around 2007 because some kids peed on the memorial.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/1...-symbolic-spot-for-the-canadian-armed-forces/

No guards before the incident:

http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=522fbf0c-e034-4e67-bbd8-a0657769c3ec

 

[werepossum]

They're ceremonial... They're there as a sign of respect between the hours of 9pm to 5pm and not year round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_War_Memorial_(Canada)
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/war-memorial-guard-program-is-designed-for-dignity

And it looks like they only started posting guards around 2007 because some kids peed on the memorial.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/1...-symbolic-spot-for-the-canadian-armed-forces/

No guards before the incident:

http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=522fbf0c-e034-4e67-bbd8-a0657769c3ec

So what's the point of having them out there if they can't shoot the little pissers?

 

[Victorian Gray]

That's just insane.


COULD you have helped him? Seems to me that by diverting even more of people's work product into redistribution you could help some people, but you'll just enable the others to better arm themselves.

Ok

 

[sandorski]

So what's the point of having them out there if they can't shoot the little pissers?

They are not there to shoot anyone.

 

[Victorian Gray]

 

[werepossum]

They are not there to shoot anyone.

Apparently they're out there as targets.

 

[Victorian Gray]

Apparently they're out there as targets.

Because we have a long line of attacks by mentally disturbed crackheads on troops performing ceremonial duties.

 

[Zorkorist]

I'm reminded of The Fountainhead, where it is explained that efficiency, even by Government, is right. Having "Guard's" wearing traditional costume is stupid.

If you want guard's you outfit today's technology, to guard.

Not some fancy tourist show.

-John

 

[sandorski]

Apparently they're out there as targets.

Apparently you don't understand the word Ceremonial.

 

[werepossum]

Because we have a long line of attacks by mentally disturbed crackheads on troops performing ceremonial duties.

Well, you appear to be starting one.

Apparently you don't understand the word Ceremonial.

Nope, understand it just fine. Unfortunately, one family just got a very painful education about its ramifications in today's world.

 

[Victorian Gray]

Well, you appear to be starting one.


Nope, understand it just fine. Unfortunately, one family just got a very painful education about its ramifications in today's world.

You might like to see guys like this at your monuments but I don't think most Canadian would appreciate it.

 

[Victorian Gray]

Well, you appear to be starting one.

Mmmm, tasty. 10 internet points for you.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

Apparently they're out there as targets.

I don't believe the honor guard at the Tomb of the unknown soldier are carrying loaded weapons either. However, the DC, and monument police nearby are.
As we have recently witnessed, even armed cops with vests can be ambushed, and killed.

 

[Imp]

Looks like we finally have a clearer picture of what happened once the guy got inside parliament:

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...s_from_security_forces_before_fatal_shot.html

Says he was already shot multiple times and took cover before the person people have been celebrating killed him. One guard tried to wrestle his weapon away before getting shot -- haven't heard as much about this.