Published on this site, June 23, 2007 [Également disponible en français]
June 23: A Disturbing Anniversary
by
Pierre Lemieux
Today is the sixth anniversary of the murder of Lucie Gélinas and the serious wounding of her three travel companions. Who will remember?
On June 23, 2001, a perilous car chase started on a Montréal expressway. Driving the pursuing car was Jocelyn Hotte, an off-duty RCMP officer. The pursued car was driven by Hotte’s former girlfriend, Lucie Gélinas, who was riding with three male friends. Shooting from his moving car with his RCMP-issued pistol, Hotte pumped some 15 bullets into Ms. Gélinas’s car. The jury later heard the 911 recording of Lucie Gélinas screaming for help as Hotte was ramming her car and shooting. Lucie Gélinas was hit and killed. Her three passengers sustained serious bullet wounds. Years later, Pierre Mainville, one of the passengers, said about Hotte, “He got 25 years in prison and I got life in a wheelchair.”
The fact that Hotte won’t get out of jail before June 23, 2023 is no solution for Lucie Gélinas or Pierre Mainville. And why has this tragic event of just six years ago been so rapidly forgotten? Perhaps because it brings to light so many absurdities in the public perception of gun controls.
Although Lucie Gélinas had previously been harassed and threatened by Hotte, there was no possible defence for her and her passengers. As simple citizens, any of them who would have carried a handgun in the car would have been liable for up to 10 years in jail according to the Criminal Code. In fact, anybody in the car simply knowing that a handgun was present would have been liable to the same penalty. The occupants of Lucie Gélinas’s car were, by law defenceless targets.
Before he got his revenge for being dumped by his girlfriend, Jocelyn Hotte worked as a politicians’ and foreign dignitaries’ bodyguard, the same sort who accompany Stephen Harper and Jean Charest. He had been Gille Duceppe’s bodyguard, among others. He was more or less literally a praetorian (a bodyguard of the emperor in Ancient Rome). Strangely, after the tragic events of June 23, 2001, there was virtually no call for disarming praetorians. But those protected by them continued to take steps to disarm citizens.
Is it just a fluke that the department of the Sûreté du Québec (the Québec Provincial Police) in charge of applying the federal gun controls in the province reports to the Direction the la protection de l’État, which translates into “Directorate for the Protection of the State”or "Directorate of State Security".
Another anomaly that should have been brought to light by the murder of Lucie Gélinas by Jocelyn Hotte relates to the relations between policemen and citizens. When the New York City police was created in 1844, nothing prevented ordinary citizens from carrying concealed weapons, as handgun prohibition only came to the city in 1911. It is the police officers who were forbidden to carry guns in whatever way until the late 1860s, and then to carry them openly until the early 20th century. Similarly, in the so-called “Tottenham Outrage,” which occurred in London, England, on Janyary 23, 1909, some passing citizens lent their concealed handguns to the unarmed policemen who were pursuing armed killers.
Would there be more murders if ordinary citizens recovered their traditional liberties to be armed (when they wish to)? People who would base public policy on counting corpses answer Yes, because they don’t count all the corpses. Lot of statistical and historical evidence shows that, in the net, an armed citizenry prevents more crimes that thugs can commit with more easily available firearms. Comparing American states with culturally similar neighbouring Canadian provinces, there are fewer homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in most cases, just like there are few homicides in heavily armed Switzerland. Or just consider Canada half a century ago: the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants has increased by 53% since it started being calculated.
The causality links are complex, and I don’t have time to dwell more into them here. But let’s do some voodoo sociology and discard the sort of evidence reported above. Assume that regaining our traditional liberties – for example, by not legally forbidding guards or teachers or other personnel to bring guns in schools – would generate more “net corpses”. Even then, I would argue, the morality of the right of ordinary citizens to keep and bear arms would be unchanged. There is a moral distinction between being unable, in a free society, to stop all murderers, and forbidding their innocent victims to defend themselves (if they wish): the first one is not a moral crime, the second is.
In a society of sovereign individuals, perhaps Lucie Gélinas or one of her companions would have chosen to have the means to return fire, killing Hotte or forcing him to keep his distances. Or perhaps Hotte, as much of a trained praetorian as he was, would have thought twice about committing his cowardly crime.