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.
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“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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. 🥰
Cars are made for transport, guns are made for killing. They are not the same.
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.
The way too many people drive I’m not so sure cars weren’t made for killing
