Send via PayPal using this link: https://www.paypal.me/ThatLibertyGuy. He's now driving a handicap-accessible bus in Taber. "It's going to happen again." Listen and subscribe to get a daily fix on the latest political news and issues. "You're supposed to feel safe in school," said Jessica Robinson, a Grade 10 W. R. Myers student, as she nervously knitted her fingers on her lap at Taber's civic centre. Come join our vibrant and growing community of shooting sports enthusiasts! Life in general is a struggle.". Partner content is not updated. What they discovered was a socially awkward boy who was bullied his whole life. Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. -- It was a snowy, spring day on April 28, 1999, when an angry teenager walked through the doors of W.R. Myers High School. "We didn't know what was going on," Drouin told Maclean's, "but then some of my friends started to say, 'It's probably like that thing in Colorado.' The parallels between last week's shooting in Taber, Alta., and the April 20 massacre in Littleton, Colo., are chilling. The parallels between last week's shooting in Taber, Alta., and the April 20 massacre in Littleton, Colo., are chilling. "It starts with a simple thing, like parents spending more time with their children," he told Maclean's, "and it grows from there.". And that was a moment of total blackness," he says. How could such a thing have happened and what could be done to prevent it from reoccurring? Stuart Auty, a former vice-principal and now head of the Toronto-based Canadian Safe School Network, says it is "time that governments stepped up to the plate. Firing four rounds, he shot them both. The maximum sentence a young offender can receive is 10 years, a point I discuss in my article about the Richardson Family Murders, which occurred in 2006 in Medicine Hat, just an hour northeast of Taber. But he also offered another chilling insight into the Taber tragedy. Jason Lang, son of Anglican Pastor Dale Lang, was mortally wounded and died later at the hospital. He reportedly pointed the rifle at a teacher, who told him she didn’t think his stunt was funny. Taber's cloistered little world was shattered shortly after 1 p.m. last Wednesday when a former W. R. Myers student entered the school brandishing a .22-calibre semi-automatic rifle, a weapon commonly used for rodent control on farms. Canada. "He was a very fine young man who loved life, played soccer, hockey and golf and enjoyed spending time with his friends," read Lang, his eyes welling with tears. Gun opponents, noting that Alberta boasts the highest levels of gun ownership in the country, said the shootings proved the need for stricter firearms controls. Yet another parallel between the Littleton and Taber tragedies was the immediate - and massive - media interest. “He pointed the gun at my head and then at my stomach and said, ‘Get out of here’,” said Colby Cannady, another grade 9 student. One bullet struck Jason Lang, a 17-year-old Grade 11 student. "So I ran away to my classroom, crying and screaming for help." Over the next tense moments, others encountered the shooter. And I ask God what’s going on in the world and what I should be doing.”. Taber, Alberta, shooting, W.R. Myers High School, Jason Lang There appears to be an issue with the Chrome browser and the “Buy Me a Coffee” widget above. Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription. As always, answers are elusive. Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta, notes that the outpouring of fear and grief that accompanied the shootings in Colorado, vividly portrayed on television, shows disaffected youth that it is easy to gain the attention they crave by wreaking havoc on the objects of their anger. ", Der remembers how his client was locked in a school locker and beaten by a group of boys and girls while alone on a playground. During surgery he suffered a stroke that left him with trouble eating, speaking and thinking coherently. While many townspeople were generous with their time and thoughts, others preferred to keep their sorrow to themselves. “Faith has always been strong and it never really left me,” Lang said last year, the 20th anniversary of his son’s murder. He shot from the hip with a gun that's inaccurate and the chances of hitting anything ... is astronomical. Although you can easily find the name of the Taber school shooter online from non-Canadian sources, the publication ban in Section 24 of Alberta’s Youth Justice Act and Section 110 of Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act prevents me from including his name in this column. If you enjoy my work, please buy me a coffee or two to keep me going! A week after the massacre in Colorado, a southern Alberta town is rocked by a school shooting. "We forgive him," says Lang. And they were taking pictures of the boy lying on the ground bleeding.". "Sometimes, you'd try to reach out to him and he'd just reject it.". As the drama unfolded in the hallways of W. R. Myers, teachers scrambled to protect their young charges. It is that reality which gives us some peace in this time of chaos." @ThatLibertyGuy, © 2004–2020 ChristopherDiArmani.com | All Rights Reserved. One answer, Auty adds, is "more early intervention programs" - because by the time an angry kid comes to class with a gun, it is too late. We have things quite good and for this sort of thing to come into our community, it just taints everything.". "Taber Shootings". In others, they crouched behind their desks for protection. Required fields are marked *. Wearing a blue trench coat, the 14-year-old pulled out a sawed off .22-calibre rifle and fired four shots in the hallway of the public school in Taber, a small agricultural community in the heart of Alberta's southern Bible Belt. Canadians can only hope - and pray - that he is wrong. Reporters were generally polite when students or their parents declined to be interviewed - but frictions did emerge. Harley Phillips, Taber's mayor and the town's former police chief, rejected that argument. Sadly, Drouin's friends were correct, and as she recounted how tragedy had now been brought to her doorstep, the slight, blond schoolgirl confessed that her biggest fear was the thought of returning to class when her school reopens this week. This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on May 10, 1999. Use your credit card in my online store to support me with a one-time donation, a monthly recurring donation, or an annual donation. As in the case of the two teenage killers in Colorado, the young Taber gunman was described by most former classmates as a loner who was frequently the object of teasing and ridicule (during the past year he had been home-schooled). As a spring snowstorm lashed against her face, 11-year-old Megan Drouin stood outside W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alta., last Thursday and recalled the horrors of the previous 24 hours. And it was here that students had to grapple most directly with the consequences. "You don't forget these things and you mark every year as it goes by.". It is the sort of place where people often leave their car doors - and even their homes - unlocked, and where they still speak proudly about being law-abiding, family-oriented Christians. Then, as we’ve seen in Nova Scotia this week, the killer’s life was pried open and examined under a media microscope. May God have mercy on this broken society and all the hurting people in it. " According to 14-year-old Garrett Holstine, the situation was finally defused after he convinced the boy - whom he described as a close friend - to relinquish his weapon. Shane Christmas, 17, was hit in the stomach. “There really has never been words that could express to someone the blackness, the emptiness, the absolute pain of that moment,” he said. Tragedy in TABER. When the students finally did emerge, other echoes of Columbine quickly surfaced. Jason Lang, 17, was killed when a 14-year-old boy started randomly shooting … Bergman, B.,, & Chisholm, P., Taber Shootings (2013). "Faith has always been strong and it never really left me. ", Amid the grief in Taber last week, some all-too-familiar questions emerged. "It affects every aspect of my adult life.". He described the teen as a scrawny kid with a bad complexion and glasses. Wearing a blue trenchcoat to mimic the Columbine killers, the young man entered the main hallway of the school. No Right to Bear Arms in Canada? In, Bergman, Brian, and Patricia Chisholm, "Taber Shootings". Lang remembers being called to the hospital, where doctors worked to save his son's life. A teenager who had come to lay flowers at the entrance to W. R. Myers reacted angrily when the TV cameras clicked on. The boy fired four shots at the pair, hitting them both once. "He pointed the gun at my head and then at my stomach and said, 'Get out of here.' While police are confirming few details of what happened next, some eyewitness accounts suggest the boy first pointed the rifle at a female teacher. There's a heightened sensitivity," he says. The difference is the scale - he could have taken out a lot more people with a high-powered rifle. For killing one young man and severely injuring another, the young offender was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by seven years of probation. Wearing a blue trench coat, the … With every school shooting in the United States that has happened since then, along with the 2016 shooting in La Loche, Sask. TABER, Alta. "Work has been a struggle. Like us on Facebook! In a scene eerily reminiscent of the Littleton shooting, students were locked away in classrooms for up to three hours before being reunited with their parents. Brian Bergman. Send an Interac eTransfer to author @ christopherdiarmani.net (remove spaces), 2. After a decade of working to end bullying in schools, Lang quit his advocacy work and his pastoral ministry. On April 28, 1999, just eight days after the Littleton, Colorado, school massacre that horrified the world, a 14-year-old high school dropout saw the Columbine killers as some deranged idols to emulate. On April 28, shortly after the lunch-hour break, a 14-year-old gunman had entered W. R. Myers and opened fire, fatally shooting one 17-year-old student and critically injuring another. "He didn't really like people," Grade 9 student Paul Garner told Maclean's. You might want to re-check your history. See these links for all the details about the thank-you gifts I offer my supporters. "It's like some horror movie that we're having to live through. A check-in on the public mood of Canadians with hosts Michael Stittle and Nik Nanos. And I don't have to think about and concentrate on this person who killed my son.". Phillips says he is far more concerned with what he describes as the lax treatment of young criminals by the courts. Police confirmed that one of the shooting victims, Jason Lang - son of a local Anglican minister, Dale Lang - had died shortly after being removed from the school. The official police version, as of late last week, was much more clipped. The shooting is a sensitive subject for some staff who were at W.R. Myers in 1999 and are still there, he says. The shooting came eight days after the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where 12 students and one teacher were killed. Contact us at info@shoot-taber.org The Alberta school shooting, like all these tragedies, left its scars on those closest to it. First, he campaigned against the bullying some say led to his son’s murder. (THE CANADIAN PRESS / Mike Ridewood). Calgary lawyer Balfour Der represented the teen and says the case is never far from his mind. "This was a random act of violence," Mar said of the Taber shootings. A Pittance of Time... in honour of our veterans. "I think the copycat phenomenon will be limited in Canada," says Raymond Corrado, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University. Lunchtime, a high school - and a teenager with a gun. ", A lot of people are feeling that way these days in Taber, a picket-fence kind of town that until now had been best known for its sugar refinery and harvests of sweet, juicy corn.

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