A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least nine people and injuring others.

Some of those attending the festival helped arrest the suspect at the scene, who police identified as a 30-year-old man.

…

“It’s something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime,” Kris Pangilinan, a Toronto-based journalist, told Canadian public broadcaster CBC. “[The driver] just slammed the pedal down and rammed into hundreds of people. It was like seeing a bowling ball hit — all the bowling pins and all the pins flying up in the air.”

He continued, “It was like a war zone… There were bodies all over the ground.”

  • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
    2122·
    20 hours ago

    Cars are absolutely not the problem here. Yes cars have issues, but using this as an anti-car platform is disgusting and shameful.

    This is a growing problem with mental illness, racism, and the right wing. Focus on the problem.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1418·
      17 hours ago

      Oh yeah, the old “this isn’t a gun car issue; this is a mental health issue”. “You’re disgusting for trying to make this mass-shooting mass-ramming about guns cars; this isn’t the time™.” It’s such a shame that the US is the only place in the world with a mental health crisis and that’s why first-world gun deaths almost exclusively happen in the US, not in Canada where firearms are heavily reg– checks title Oh wait. It seems like “This isn’t an X issue, it’s a mental health one” curiously always seems to come back to “I want you to solve this nebulous, prolific, and stochastic issue in lieu of addressing the most immediate, concrete problem by regulating X because I really like my privileged position of being able to use X however and wherever I want and fuck anybody who suffers for or questions that privilege.”

      Why can’t it be both? Car deaths have concrete, meaningful steps we could immediately take (pedestrianizing roads, adding bollards to pedestrian streets, reducing car dependency so fewer people own and drive cars, etc., and that’s just for incidents where people intentionally use cars to murder people), but it seems like you happen to prefer ignoring the reality that designing cities around cars is horribly dangerous and dysfunctional. “Cars have issues”? Yeah, try reading the title to see one of them.

      It’s so obvious this attack was trivial to a point where it’s not even settled that it was intentional. You think this man could’ve killed nine eleven people and injured twenty more with his fists? Seriously?? [Editor’s note: they seriously compare it to being armed with fists in a now-removed comment.] Even a knife attack is considerably more difficult, and it has at least some minimum barrier that you need to be in some kind of physical condition to perpetrate one, that there’s a minimal chance of escaping the scene, that there’s more chance of stopping it early, and that a car attack can be done much more impulsively. Plus there’s the matter that regulating cars is massively easier than regulating knives. A goddamn infirm 90-year-old has the capacity to perpetrate this attack. And what would’ve prevented it completely? A few slabs of concrete or steel that any decent pedestrian street would have. Make psychological and psychiatric care free under Canada’s Medicare? Absolutely, do it. Do it right now; why haven’t we already? Do I think that’d be as effective at preventing this attack as literally just some slabs on the street? No.

      • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
        124·
        19 hours ago

        You know there is a forest behind these trees right?

        And I never said guns weren’t a problem, that’s you talking for me because you have no respect for anyone else’s opinion if it might challenge yours.

        If you took the time to do the root cause analysis, you would have a different opinion of the problem. So, you can choose to keep your belief, or educate yourself. I’m guessing you go with the one that delivers the most dopamine.

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
          912·
          19 hours ago

          And I never said guns weren’t a problem, that’s you talking for me because you have no respect for anyone else’s opinion if it might challenge yours.

          I hope you’re smart enough to understand what an “analogy” is? If not, here you go. “Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share.” Hope that helps, champ. 🥰

          • Grass Cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
            64·
            19 hours ago

            posting definitions at someone who appears more educated than yourself is straight middleschool behavior from you.

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
              59·
              17 hours ago

              They clearly weren’t educated enough to understand the basic rhetorical device of analogy – that I was comparing excuses for mass-shootings to excuses for car rammings as functionally the same – so I feel pretty secure in posting definitions.

              Middle-school behavior for middle-school concepts, I guess?

              Edit: sorry, I forgot that they also think this person could’ve killed nine eleven people and injured twenty with their bare fists, so maybe middle-school behavior was too sophisticated.

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
              62·
              16 hours ago

              So you do or do not understand that when I was talking about guns, I was drawing a direct comparison between your misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health and right-wingers’ misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health? Not actually assuming what your stance on gun regulation is? That is our common understanding now, right? You can amend your comment to acknowledge that you misunderstood this basic rhetorical device? Or acknowledge it in some form? You’re not going to “never play defense” me here, right?

              • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
                35·
                18 hours ago

                You hate cars more than you hate people dying. That’s probably why you don’t like to dive too deep into mental health.

                • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  41·
                  17 hours ago

                  So “never play defense” then? On the concept of an analogy and the “fists” thing, right? Everyone is Kiryu Kazuma going around, killing nine eleven and injuring twenty with their fists?

                  Can you acknowledge that you were wrong about the analogy? And can you acknowledge that comparing a fist attack to an attack perpetrated by a car driver is asinine?

                  • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
                    34·
                    18 hours ago

                    It’s possible to tell when you have won when the opponent starts attacking things like grammar and language as a last ditch effort to get the dopamine they need for they day.

                    I hope you have the day you voted for 🥰 goodbye.

        • Grass Cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          73·
          19 hours ago

          I have no clue how your comment here got 5 downvotes.

          This place is just like reddit/twitter—iIllogical and vitriolic.

        • Montagge@lemmy.zipEnglish
          117·
          19 hours ago

          The way too many people drive I’m not so sure cars weren’t made for killing

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
          118·
          17 hours ago

          Right here, right now, they can be compared to guns assuming this was an attack. Were it not for car-centric infrastructure, a car couldn’t even have reached this crowded festival. There would’ve been trivial safety measures like bollards in place, but because we as a society collectively value vroom vroom over human lives, they weren’t in place. With nine eleven killed and twenty injured, it was comparable in devastation to a mass-shooting. Just like when the US values pew pew over human lives, there are mass-shootings.

          But you’re right: they aren’t the same.

          • Cars kill over one million people per year, and they injure and maim many, many more than guns do.
          • Cars are unnecessary in the vast majority of cases, but they’re shoehorned into cities thanks to the enormous lobbying power of the auto industry combined with the widespread, entrenched propaganda that said lobbying has spent the last century producing. We’ll rip out safe and affordable transit to make room for these financial black holes, but even the most tepid attempt to push back on this takes decades of activism only to be met with a ridiculous half-measure in favor of cars or nothing at all. (Actually, this last bit does kind of sound like guns in the US.)
          • We willingly subsidize cars (tax credits on EVs, free parking, parking mandates, vast road networks, etc.) instead of building the kinds of infrastructure that largely obsolete cars to begin with.
          • Cars are absolutely destroying our planet. They’re one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, and car-centric infrastructure even exacerbates a major effect of climate change by destroying greenery that absorbs some of the heat (which consequently makes people more likely to drive in air-conditioned cars; rinse and repeat). They additionally spread particulate matter into the air that puts (especially poorer) people who live near major roadways at substantially increased risk of health issues. They divide populations of wildlife, and I could just go on forever.
          • Cars are heavily indoctrinated into children as a rite of passage into adulthood that everybody should own. Almost no consideration is given for those who don’t.
          • Guns have an obnoxious culture to see who can own the biggest, loudest, most expensive, most dangerous, most overkill piece of shit, where you’re seen as some kind of sheltered hippie liberal if you choose not to own one. Anyone who barely knows how to use one can own one, and– wait, sorry, that’s also cars again.
          • I could go on about their infrastructure being an accessibility nightmare, being vastly more expensive, bankrupting cities, disadvantaging people in the inner cities who have to subsidize the car-centric suburbs and deal with their traffic, and so on, but I’m sure I have a character limit.

          By the way, “guns are made for killing” can just as easily be warped into “guns are made for self-protection”, and suddenly you can compare if their utility outweighs their ease of access and rampant deregulation – just like you can with cars.

          • angrystego@lemmy.worldEnglish
            54·
            18 hours ago

            Now give me the positive statistics. Cars save lives as well. Think of all the emergency vehicles that help people every day. I’m pretty sure guns are way less helpful.

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
              54·
              16 hours ago

              Okay, let’s see here. If we put aside the climate change killing untold trillions of animals on top of the mass-extinction event, the untold number of humans that have died and will die from climate change, the number of people displaced by climate change, the over a million people killed annually, the few million injured annually (many permanently and debilitatingly), the billions of dollars in annual property damage, the regions destabilized and the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced over oil wars, the lung issues from air pollution and the brain damage from when it was leaded, the neighborhoods destroyed to make way for roads, the poverty in the inner city caused in large part by unsustainable suburban sprawl, the people bankrupted by the need to own a car, the opportunity cost from the money wasted on overpriced car infrastructure, the amount of hours wasted driving because of said sprawl, the contribution to the obesity epidemic by making people more sedentary, the disenfranchisement of the elderly, young, and disabled who can’t drive or would have a much easier time on public transit, that many of those emergency vehicles are responding to car crashes, that lower traffic and less sprawl via public transit and micromobility lowers response times for emergency vehicles (thus saving more lives), and if we totally disregard that emergency vehicles are more than capable of existing in a city built around public transit and micromobility (and much more that I’m forgetting)…

              A rounding error in comparison. That your answer was “emergency vehicles” shows that you don’t understand the scope and scale of how badly car-centric infrastructure damages everything it touches. It isn’t on the same order of magnitude; it isn’t even within a few orders of magnitude. If anything, emergency vehicles have been hampered by the rampant proliferation and deregulation of cars, because it makes it harder for them to get to their destination quickly and safely.

              • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                4·
                17 hours ago

                If anything, emergency vehicles have been hampered by the rampant proliferation and deregulation of cars, because it makes it harder for them to get to their destination quickly and safely.

                Hell, half of the time I can’t move as quickly as I would like to through the city with my bicycle it is due to cars being in the way of moving quickly and efficiently. And that is a lot smaller than an ambulance.

          • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
            143·
            19 hours ago

            It’s the other way around in this situation. This isn’t a car accident. The fact is this person attacked a group of people. The weapon is whatever they could get their hands on. It’s Canada so obviously a gun isn’t the go-to weapon of choice like it is in the States.

          • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
            45·
            17 hours ago

            I like how they’ve so far completely failed to defend or even address what they said about “fists” because they know it’s a heap of bullshit. They apparently want us to think that the everyman on the street is Kiryu Kazuma who can roll up to a crowded festival and kill nine eleven people with their bare fists then injure like ten twenty more before being restrained and brought into custody.

            • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
              12·
              16 hours ago

              So you’ve made my argument for me by showing that the tool used in an assault is not relevant, and by focusing on the tool you solve nothing.

              • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                16 hours ago

                … What? I’m taking the piss out of your argument that the tool isn’t relevant. You tried to bring “fists” into this as a comparison. Unless you’re willing to say that I could go out right now into a crowd of people and kill eleven and wound twenty with my bare hands like I’m the Internet badass from the Navy SEALs copypasta, then you’re absolutely full of it and are just running with the recently popularized bad-faith argumentation strategy of “never play defense”.

                Do you or do you not believe that it is possible for me to go out into a crowd of people of some description unarmed, then kill eleven people and wound twenty with – your words, not mine – “my fists”. Are you actually that deluded, or were you mistaken in comparing a car attack to a fist attack?

                • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
                  12·
                  16 hours ago

                  My opinion of fists is totally irrelevant as it is used to represent a tool of any kind. Thank you for so clearly pointing out that the tool doesn’t matter at all.

                  I will note, that if the design of the tool is to be used solely as a weapon (such as a gun) then it does matter, but only emphasizes the issue of mental health.

                  To answer your direct question, even though we have established the tool is irrelevant… I do not have any way to predict your performance in an unarmed fight. If I had to make an uneducated guess: I imagine you lack the physical ability to do much more than type as you are.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
                3·
                16 hours ago

                The tool is very relevant when it enables greater amounts of violence.

                Killing nine people with your fists is extremely hard and you’d probably die trying. A car, gun, or bomb makes it much easier.

                • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
                  11·
                  16 hours ago

                  We should remove devices whose sole purpose is to be used as a weapon. But otherwise anything could be used as a weapon, regardless of its original purpose.

                  However, I do feel that combustion vehicles should be eliminated entirely as they are no longer needed and are clearly damaging the planet.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
                    3·
                    16 hours ago

                    But not anything could be used as a mass murder weapon. Killing nine people with a kitchen knife would also be quite hard (technically possible if the attacker gets lucky, but still more likely to result in the attacker dying)

                    The fact that cars are all potential mass murder weapons isn’t my primary reason for wanting to ban cars, but it’s totally a reason.