Exactly 50 years ago on October 27, 1975, a troubled high school student in Ottawa murdered a neighbor at his home and then opened fire in his packed religion class at St. Pius X High School. The 16-year-old student was armed with a shotgun when he walked into the backdoor of a classroom. Most of the students were facing away from him when he shot 17-year-old Mark Hough in the head and wounded 5 others.
After firing multiple shots into the classroom, the 16-year-old shooter walked into the hallway and died from a self-inflicted wound. The classroom where the shooting happened was being taught by a priest who read the severely wounded students their last rites.
Mark Hough’s parents had an open casket funeral so that everyone could see the horrific injuries that firearms cause. Within days of the shooting, thousands of Ottawans decided the danger from these weapons was greater than the personal benefit of gun ownership. In the video, you can see piles of firearms being crushed by heavy machinery after Canadians voluntarily turned in their guns.
The day after the shooting, the students returned to the same room—and even sat in the exact same desks—where classes continued as scheduled (with coffee and donuts to help them cope). Experts at the time said that taking time off school to think about the trauma would be more damaging to them. One student who was inside the room and not injured recollected going to high school football practice hours after the attack and thinking “what are we even playing for”.
To mark the 50th anniversary, CBC spoke to survivors of the school shooting to find out what happened in the days and decades that followed. This was 24 years before the Columbine school shooting yet if you erased the date in the story, the details are the same as nearly every school shooting that has happened in the United States.
After this attack, Canada collectively went down a path of making sure that a mass fatality school shooting wouldn’t happen again. In the United States, we also had a chance to make changes after a tragic school shooting just months before Ottawa, but the next 50 years of US history turned out much different from Canada.
Olean High (1974)
A year before the Ottawa school shooting, a 17-year-old honors student on the rifle team at Olean High in upstate New York shot 14 people (including a pregnant woman who was killed) from an upper floor window at the school.
He was a star marksman on his school’s rifle team, had the eighth highest academic score in his senior class, was inducted into the National Honor Society, and won a Regents Scholarship. Following the shooting, police had found homemade smoke bombs, gasoline and glass bottles, and empty propane canisters in his bedroom. Police also found, bomb recipes and a journal that detailed his plans for the shooting. In a note explaining his motives, he wrote:
I guess I just wanted to kill the person I hate most -- myself, I just didn’t have the courage. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it, so I had to get someone to do it for me. It didn’t work out.
This 1974 school shooter had the same suicidal and nihilistic views as the school shooters who commit attacks in 2025.
In addition to the St. Pius X High school shooting, also in 1975, a student opened fire at Brampton Centennial Secondary School in Ontario killing one teacher and one student, wounding 13 others, and then killing himself. These were the only mass shootings (4+ victims) to happen at k-12 schools in Canada until 2016 at La Loche Community School in Saskatchewan. Two brothers were killed at a home before the 17-year-old perpetrator went to the school and killed a teacher and a teacher’s aide, and wounded seven students.
Meanwhile in the United States, we’ve had 224 ‘active shooters’ at schools since 1975.
Looking at school shootings with 4+ victims, the chart shows the same pattern:
It didn’t need to be like this when Canada and the United States are so similar. Over the last fifty years, both countries have grown increasingly similar by sharing language, media, intertwined economies, cross-border power, water, gas, and telecom infrastructure, binational sports leagues (MLB, NBA, and NHL), free trade (until this year), and open borders (until this year). While American culture has heavily influenced Canada, Canada has avoided mass gun violence and essentially solved mass fatality school shootings.
Different outcomes for US and Canada
Fifty years ago, one school shooting caused massive shifts in the personal and societal views of guns in Canada. Today, only 22% of Canadian households own a gun compared to ~50% of Americans. That’s a striking difference given how much of Canada is remote wilderness. In the US, only 4.8% of the population hunts recreationally or for food. In Canada, the rate of hunting is even lower at 3% nationally with higher subgroups in remote areas like Newfoundland (12%), Labrador (12%), and New Brunswick (9%).
When a small percentage of people hunt in either country, the biggest difference that contributes to gun deaths is handgun ownership. Canada has strict licensing and ownership requirements to own or carry a handgun while many US states don’t even require a license or safety training. In 30 states, an adult can buy a handgun with cash at a gun show without needing a background check or leaving any paper trail. As a result, Canada’s gun death rate is 24x lower than the United States. In case you missed that…the gun death rate in Canada is twenty-four times lower than the US.
A 50-year comparative case study of the US and Canada shows that school shootings and child gun deaths are no inevitable. If American society decided to care about the lives of kids, the leading cause of death for children in the US can be essentially solved overnight by simply following Canada’s sensible and practical gun ownership policies.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Thank you for continuing to highlight practical solutions to a solvable problem!