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.”
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.
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.