Tragedy in Taber

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tled in the loamy farmland just east of the Rockies, Taber, Alberta, has a lot in common with U.S. towns to the south: grain elevators standing sentry at the edge of town, oil-patch spin-off businesses, eight churches serving a population of 7,200. There is also shared ancestry. Taber was founded by Mormons from Utah who traveled north through the foothills a century ago in search of richer land. Ties with the western U.S., many Albertans will tell you, are stronger than those with other parts of Canada.

Now there is shared tragedy. Just eight days after the horrifying school massacre in Littleton, Colo., Taber staggered under the enormity of the first fatal school shooting in Canada in more than two decades. Absolutely no one thought it possible that a 14-year-old former student at W.R. Myers High School, weighed down with adolescent resentments and a sawed-off .22-cal. rifle, would shoot two 17-year-old boys he hardly knew without the macabre inspiration of Littleton. "The coverage of Colorado is what made him do it," said one of the shooter's few friends, Garrett Holstine, 14. "He thought maybe people would pay attention to him."

With Jason Lang dead and Shane Christmas severely wounded at the hands of an assailant too young to get a driver's license (and anonymous under the Young Offenders Act), there was a grim consensus across Canada that in yet another and deeply troubling way, the dividing line between the neighboring societies had been erased. It had almost been expected. In a Southam/COMPAS poll taken after the April 20 Littleton bloodbath but before the April 28 Taber shooting, three-quarters of respondents said they thought something similar to Littleton could very well happen in Canada. "We don't have the proliferation of guns that they have in the U.S.," says Stuart Auty, head of the Canadian Safe School Network, a Toronto-based group working to prevent school violence, "but we've got everything else." From film to video games to the inescapable culture of alienation, North American teenage society "is seamless," he says.

As the country absorbed the news of Taber, the reaction was muted. The shooting produced hand wringing by top officials in Ottawa and Edmonton but no hint that authorities would respond with new legislation. Instead, Federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan, who hails from Alberta, declared wanly that Canada needed better public education to help people "understand that firearms are potentially lethal things." Parents and school-violence experts called for tighter school-security measures and better counseling for obviously troubled students. But the overriding reaction was numb disbelief. In Taber, said Carol Atwood, whose son attends W.R. Myers, "things like this don't happen."

They certainly hadn't happened before, but it was not completely random that the first and so far only fatal copycat shooting after the Colorado massacre erupted in Alberta. Of all the provinces, it claims the highest proportion of households with firearms--39%, not far below the world-beating U.S. average of 42% and half again as high as Canada's 26%. A search of the young shooter's house last week uncovered 12 guns, a large but not unheard of tally for a home in western Canada. Alberta also has a higher than average rate of violent crime and murder, and twice the national average of children under 15 killed by guns.

But it was teen anger, not statistics, that exploded in the W.R. Myers High School hall. Peers of the accused say he was the butt of ceaseless teasing and bullying from the day he arrived in town from Ontario three years earlier. About 5 ft. 4 in. tall, slightly built and suffering from chronic acne, he was neither a jock nor a brain. "Even the nerds picked on him," said a friend. "It was the way he looked, the way he acted," ventured Stacey Larsen, 16, a former classmate. Holstine says the boy's refusal to fight back when attacked made his tormentors even more merciless. Before leaving school last year, the youth often showed up for class with cuts and bruises. During a Boy Scout trip outside town last year, the boy was left stranded on a ledge by his peers, screaming for help. No one came to his aid. Nothing he did, from helping other kids with their homework to defiantly shaving his head, lessened the ostracism.