Marc Lépine was born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi in Montreal, Quebec, in 1964. He was the son of an Algerian non-commissioned military veteran and a French-Canadian former nun. His childhood home was defined by severe systemic domestic violence; his biological father was an explicitly abusive, authoritarian patriarch who openly asserted that women were inherently inferior to men and had no functional place in intellectual or professional fields. Following his parents’ divorce, he legally changed his name to Marc Lépine at age 14 to distance himself from his father, yet he quickly began internalizing a profound, misanthropic resentment.

Lépine was intellectually competent but highly detached. He attempted to build a path in electronics and tech areas, but failed out of his pre-university science courses. In 1986, he applied to join the Canadian Armed Forces but was rejected during the psychological evaluation phase, being deemed unsuitable for military operation. This rejection further damaged his fragile ego. He became completely obsessed with war movies, survivalist gear, and technical execution blueprints.

His primary psychological slide into ideologically driven hatred happened in the late 1980s. Lépine developed a severe, systemic obsession with women who were building academic careers in traditionally male-dominated professional fields, specifically engineering. He applied for admission to the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1986 and 1989, but was turned away because he lacked the necessary math and physics prerequisites. Lépine projected this personal academic failure entirely onto women, pathologically convincing himself that female candidates were stealing spots from qualified men through affirmative action tracking.

On November 21, 1989, Lépine entered a Checkmate Sports store in Montreal to procure his primary tactical implement. Because he lacked a prior criminal profile or documented institutional psychiatric holds, he easily cleared the standard regulatory checks of the era. He purchased a Sturm, Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle—a civilian long gun chambered in .223 Remington—alongside a fixed hunting knife and multiple magazines.

In the two weeks leading up to December, Lépine systematically modified his carrying kit. He packed a dark vinyl utility bag with loose ammunition boxes and filled his pockets with rapid-reload strippers. In his pocket, he carried a three-page premeditated suicide note that detailed an explicitly political execution list, containing the names of 19 prominent Quebec women whom he labeled as “radical feminists” who needed to be destroyed.

**16:00 PM // Reconnaissance and Insertion:** Lépine arrived at the École Polytechnique campus building. He sat inside the Registrar’s office for nearly an hour, studying student distributions. He carried his Ruger rifle completely hidden inside a long plastic trash bag, checking building directories before ascending to the upper class levels.

**17:10 PM // The Classroom Room Separation:** Lépine targeted Room 303 on the third floor, where approximately 60 students were listening to a mechanical engineering presentation. Brandishing his semi-automatic rifle, Lépine commanded the presentation to halt. He explicitly ordered all the men to move to the left side of the room and all the women to the right. When the students initially assumed it was a graduation prank, Lépine fired a warning shot into the ceiling.

**17:15 PM // The Anti-Feminist Execution:** Lépine ordered all 50 male students out into the hallway. Turning back toward the nine remaining female students, he demanded to know if they knew why they were there. When student Nathalie Provost answered that they were just engineering students trying to learn, Lépine shouted, *”You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!”* He opened fire at point-blank range, killing six women instantly and wounding three others.

**17:20 PM // Multi-Floor Corridor Sweep:** Lépine exited into the third-floor corridors, moving systematically through administrative desks and student lounges. He hunted down and shot female students who were working at their drafting tables or trying to flee down the fire escapes. He descended to the cafeteria on the lower level, where hundreds of students were gathered. The crowd scattered as Lépine marched through the food paths, tracking and shooting female students trapped against the serving counters.

**17:28 PM // Room 234 and Suicide:** Lépine moved up to the second floor, entering Room 234. He stalked between the desks, shooting female students who had dived underneath for cover. He cornered Maryse Leclair on a raised presentation platform, stabbing her repeatedly with his hunting knife after his rifle magazine emptied. Moments later, Lépine stripped off his hunting vest, placed his rifle to his forehead, and pulled the trigger. The entire active tracking campaign lasted just 20 minutes; Lépine had fired 60 live rounds, killing 14 women and wounding 14 others.

The physical corridors and classrooms of the university structure were left scarred by heavy ballistics damage. Plaster dust, shattered glass from security doors, and abandoned student notebooks lined the blood-slicked floors of Room 303 and the cafeteria sectors. Emergency medical responders and Montreal police teams faced a chaotic scene, as hundreds of traumatized students were fleeing down the snowy campus hills into the freezing winter evening.

When forensic teams processed Lépine’s jacket at the scene, they extracted his suicide note. The document blamed “radical feminists” for ruining his entire life, claiming that his actions were a rational act of political war. Lépine wrote, *”If I commit suicide today, it is not for economic reasons… but for political reasons. For I have decided to send the Adorables Feminists who have always ruined my life to their Maker.”* The document sent shockwaves across Canada, forcing the country to confront a dark undercurrent of lethal misogyny.

The Polytechnique massacre completely altered Canada’s political culture and gun tracking infrastructure. In response to the tragedy, a massive grassroots coalition of survivors and bereaved families organized the **Coalition for Gun Control**. This fierce advocacy campaign culminated in the passage of the **1995 Firearms Act**, which instituted strict licensing loops, expanded background vetting tracks, and mandated a comprehensive national long-gun registry.

In 1991, the Parliament of Canada officially established December 6 as the **National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women**, marked annually by white ribbon campaigns across the country. The university chose to preserve and remodel the classrooms, transforming the campus courtyard into a commemorative installation. Fourteen granite pillars are set into the ground, lit by a soft white beam to honor each individual woman executed in the attack.

The historical verified registry of the 14 innocent women executed inside the École Polytechnique on December 6, 1989: