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.”

  • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    12 hours ago

    Can mods do something about this thread? Everyone is engaging in friendly speculation that it was terrorism, because their lizard brains are remembering the Toronto attack. This was a mental health problem. The suspect was not a white supremacist. Go back to America please.

    • vxx@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      They’re preemtively calling him radicalised, not realising how radicalised they’re themselves.

    • Paddzr@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Report the comments.

      While yes, ideally it would’ve been nice if it didn’t happen, but there’s not enough mods to police this place. It’s still better than news… That place is a complete shitshow.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    22 hours ago

    No motive has been given, although police have said they are “confident” it was not an act of terrorism.

    I wonder what makes them confident of that. It certainly resembles a terrorist attack.

  • Zacpod@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I know it’s a slim chance and I’m going out on a limb here, but something tells me the driver was a white conservative.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      12 hours ago

      Apparently it was mental health related, and he was apologizing when he came out of the car

    • venusaur@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Video shows the person looks Asian. Probably conservative. I’d imagine a lot of Filipinos voted for Trump too.

      EDIT: Filipinos. Not Filipino Canadians.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Going out on a limb that most of the Filipinos in that crowd didn’t vote for Trump, being that it happened in Canada

      • BadlyTimedLuck@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        Seems like people already believe Canada is a US state. I dunno if I should laugh at the stupidity or cry that stupidity is winning

        • venusaur@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          You misunderstand. And you’re not a very nice person. What I’m suggesting is that Filipinos have the same beliefs across the border. ChatGPT doesn’t seem to believe that’s the case tho.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          11 hours ago

          Now I’m curious as to how many people outside the US vote for American candidates as write-in votes.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          I mean, they’re still probably right that a lot of Filipinos probably voted for Trump still. Just not many in that crowd probably. And very unlikely to be “most”

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    No motive has been given, although police have said they are “confident” it was not an act of terrorism.

    Let me guess? The suspect is white! I jest, but at this point it’s probably likely the driver is a radicalized “conservative” than any other group.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      12 hours ago

      Why would you guess? You can literally just look it up. It’s all over the news.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      No. East Asian looking male with a history of mental illness.

      Most likely the political component of this tragedy is how the Socreds closed regional mental health institutions in the late 20th C, and subsequent governments just swept the whole thing under the rug while homelessness spread through the province and mentally disturbed and unsupported people lashed out in random ways.

      Now you have dorks and bootlickers like Mayor Sims turning a health system failure into an opportunity for cruelty and repression. Punishment will be the talking point. They will roll with that, watch.

    • Eril@feddit.org
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      20 hours ago

      Only a good guy with a car can stop a bad guy with a car though. Also if everyone in a crowd had a car, stuff like this wouldn’t be possible.

      /s for the people in the back

    • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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      19 hours ago

      Actually, I agree. Put them underground, in a tunnel, where people aren’t walking.

      Walking > Bikes > Trains > Buses > fuck cars.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        Don’t put them in the city at all, even in a tunnel. If you’re going into the city, park and take transit. (Edit: my complaint here is personal; Boston had an interstate running through it, which they buried, and then put a four-to-six-lane road on top of it where there was supposed to be green space.)

        Yeah, I know some people can’t do that because they’re working and need tools, e.g. plumbers, but if we get all the casual drivers on transit it’s good enough.

  • arankays@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    “car plows”

    So we only call it a murder or a terrorist attack if guns are involved?

    We are brainwashed and numb to car violence. Super sad that nothing is done to stop this from happening.

    Cars need to go. Away forever.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      Is it a terrorist attack if it’s a mental health issue?

      • arankays@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        Where are you “mental health issues” people coming from? I know you people are brainwashed by the car corporations but come on now half my inbox is full of you.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      Are you in the regular habit of bringing up your political agenda at funerals and vigils?

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.

      To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: “Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival”. “Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival.” It’s so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the “Man dies in officer-involved shooting” trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.

      The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is “Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd”, and you know why that might be written that way? Because it’s not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say “Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival.”

      Edit: the death toll is now eleven, not nine.

      • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        While I agree that it skews the narrative, it’s likely that media at early stages of the story use passive language like that to leave open the possibility of various causes, such as mechanical malfunction or even an algorithmic failure.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        19 hours ago

        Yes, but you’re mixing several points here, primarily environmental and direct harm. Car-centric city design is harmful, but a highway doesn’t up and kill people one day in the same way that a driver hitting someone with their car does.

        The other thing you’re mixing into this one comment is the attribution of harm, the “car plows into crowd” thing. Yes, the car didn’t do it, a driver drove their car into the crowd. Having the reporting properly attribute the action is a separate issue from the actions themselves.

      • blakenong@lemmings.world
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        22 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.world
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          18 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.world
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            21 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.world
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              21 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.world
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                20 hours ago

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

                • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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                  19 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.world
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                  18 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?

            • Grass Cat@lemmy.world
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              20 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.zip
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              21 hours ago

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

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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              19 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.world
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                20 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.world
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                  18 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.

              • blakenong@lemmings.world
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                21 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.world
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                19 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.world
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                  18 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.

    • wetbung@sopuli.xyz
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      22 hours ago

      There are a lot of areas that were designed based on cars. Where I live would be difficult for most of the residents without cars or something similar. The population density is too low to make most public transportation practical.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        21 hours ago

        Good news, in those places a driver going off the road isn’t going to hit a crowd of people.

        • wetbung@sopuli.xyz
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          21 hours ago

          I completely agree. If you look at the comment I was responding to, though, you’ll see they appear to be advocating a complete prohibition, “Cars need to go. Away forever.” I’m just saying there are places where that’s not practical.

          • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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            19 hours ago

            Most of those places would work just fine with a combination of trains for long distance and bicycles/walking for local travel too.

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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              18 hours ago

              Boats, trains, subways, light rail, trams, buses, cable cars, micro electric vehicles, bikes, velomobiles, scooters, skateboards, rollerblades, feet, and sensible urban planning where the nearest grocery store isn’t an hour’s walk from my house don’t exist. If it’s not a car, I don’t wanna hear about it.

            • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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              17 hours ago

              Sure, the elderly or disabled just love walking. And when you need to do a couple of miles to get groceries for the month a bicycle is great to carry those 9 bags!

              • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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                16 hours ago

                The elderly and disabled are exactly the people who are forgotten in a car centric society that assumes everyone can drive.

                • sensiblepuffin@lemmy.funami.tech
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                  15 hours ago

                  The elderly and disabled are also (more the former, but sometimes the latter) maybe not people who should be operating heavy machinery. Hey, what if we had some sort of group vehicle that someone else could operate, and everyone else just hitches a ride?

      • arankays@lemmy.ca
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        21 hours ago

        That’s because they specifically designed those areas to be car specific to serve the needs of the Nazi Ford corporation. “Population density” is a poor argument.

        Just look up pictures of America 100 years ago. Trains. Streetcars. Trams. Buses.

        Not fucking highways and urban sprawl.

        By all means, live in your little suburb with your car. We just want the cities to be safe from the violence they bring.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        It is in the sense that vehicle traffic shouldn’t be next to pedestrian areas, eliminating the opportunity for such an event to happen in the first place. At a minimum, there should be strong bollards, because mechanical failures can and do happen.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    20 hours ago

    ITT: hillbilly gun-clutchers who don’t realize cars are only working when you don’t hit something, and guns are only working when you do hit something.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      ITT: people who don’t realize that none of us are supporting guns. We’re drawing a comparison between the same ridiculous-ass logic that right-wingers apply to guns to try to stall and misdirect from concrete regulation and the exact same rhetoric people in this thread are making in defense of car culture and lack of regulation and safeguards around cars. Strict gun regulation is good; strict car regulation is good. Strict gun regulation would deter many mass-shootings in the US. Strict car regulation (including even basic considerations for pedestrian safety at the slight expense of cars) would deter car-ramming attacks.

      “Why are you talking about guns cars at a time like this? I can’t believe you’re using this tragic mass-shooting mass-ramming to soapbox about gun car regulation. This isn’t the time to talk about how we let guns cars be so dangerous and how the direct result was this shooting ramming. The real cause of this was a mental health crisis. Society needs guns cars to protect ourselves get around. What do you mean, ‘Do I ever bring up this mental health crisis outside of mass-shootings mass-rammings?’ Uhh…”