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
    11·
    19 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·
      19 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.

      • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
        21·
        18 hours ago

        Well, more than 9 people die in knife attacks all the time.

        You just don’t like cars and you want to use this as a way to eliminate them. It has nothing to do with people dying.

        If you cared about people you would find the root cause. But you don’t, because you’re angry and you want to punish everyone around you for not giving you more support.

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

          Over a million people around the world die because of cars every year. The most recent number I found for Canada was 1,998 people.

          Let’s compare that to knives. The most recent number I found for Canada was 138 people stabbed to death. Globally, 97k. Orders of magnitude in difference.

          Most vehicle deaths are accidents, but you can’t ignore the fact that cars kill far more people than knives.

          I don’t like cars, and one of the reasons is because they’re extremely deadly and driving is basically the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis.

          • blakenong@lemmings.worldEnglish
            21·
            18 hours ago

            I agree cars are dangerous.

            However, this isn’t about car accidents. This is about a person who is mentally ill and would have found a way to hurt people regardless.

            There is a right time and place to argue the existence of cars, but this is neither.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 hour ago

              This is exactly like when gun lovers try to say “this isn’t the time to discuss gun laws” and “they would have found a way to hurt people regardless”. Zero difference.

              But actually this is exactly when we should argue about the existence of cars: someone just performed a live demonstration of how dangerous they are in the hands of someone who wants to kill people. Without a car, mass killing would be much much harder and it would also be possible for people to defend themselves or escape the danger. Cars also enable impulse killings in a way knives don’t, because carrying a knife has to be premeditated whereas with a car the murder weapon is always readily available.