MALE perimeter around Portapique almost perfect : yes, the active shooter escaped, but the truth never did

For many Nova Scotians, it was almost 24 hours before they knew what the RCMP knew within minutes of arriving at Portapique on Saturday night : that they were already on the scene of the province’s worst mass killing since 1751, 270 years earlier - and that the killer was still on the loose.

But men in general, as well as everybody within the hyper-male culture of the RCMP, are not chatterboxes, preferring to be thought of as strong silent types.

Almost instantly, they tweeted out the biggest whopper of their many less-than-frank messages during and after the rampage : “its (only) a firearms “incident”, relax womenfolk and chillen, the John Wayne men have everything under control and we got the vermin hangin from the local tree.”

The first - and worst - RCMP press conference then went way beyond bizarre, focusing more on the one dead  and one wounded RCMP officer than on the civilian dead.

Viewers and reporters only got the total of dead, as known at that time, in an answer to a question asked after the the RCMP statement was complete.

And if you were one of the untold Nova Scotians, like myself, who didn’t tune into the  live press conference *because you still had no hint of the magnitude of the crime* , it was 1030 pm Sunday before I checked in Google News Canada for my news fix and saw the seeming horrendous total of ten dead (now the even more horrendous total of 24 dead).

Yes, it is a toxic male culture that breeds the nearly 100% male spree and active mass killers.

And it is the same male culture, on steroids inside the RCMP, that upped the NS death total by eight...