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.”
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.
Dude might have been drunk. If it isn’t intentional, it’s usually a case of too drunk or too old.
Or plain old mental illness
Severe, severe mental illness. He wasn’t drunk or old.
What was the mental illness?
They haven’t released his diagnosis but he had been struggling with paranoia and delusions prior. Also a long history of mental health/police contact and very recent calls from his family to hospital to get him help. This was entirely preventable if the mental health supports were adequately available.
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It does resemble a terrorist attack…
But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)…
They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, ‘suspect is well known to the department’… gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another … every month or other week.
At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says… that would require a political or ideological motivation.
The CoP … you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn’t. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with … seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.
If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.
Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just… very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.
Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.
There’s a very specific rubric for what counts as a terrorist attack in Canada. Probably the level of calculation and premeditation involved was a factor and that he’s not a part of an ideologically organized group that is trying to influence behaviour of a government or political body.
A spontaneous hate crime made against a population is technically not a terrorist attack by Canadian definition. To count you have to have done it for a narrow slice of very specific reasons.
What are you talking about, the victims weren’t white?
/s
It’s not terrorism just because the victims are white.
They also need to be billionaires.
It means they double checked and the driver was definitely white
He wasn’t. I’m not going to post his name or race here, but he has been charged and his name made public.
I’ve seen the name now and you are right, Sorry, I’ve been superficial
Looks Filipino to me.
This is the kind of uninformed bile that bots and provocateurs use, might want to rethink that readyfireaim joke.
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.
In this case I have too little insight. But it’s quite clear how biased these reports are in Germany. Anyone not absolutely German is immediately a terrorist and every white, German dude is a confused loner. Media never suspects that mental issues based on trauma from war and refugee journeys might be a good reason or that guys voting for right wing extremists and killing “woke” people might have anything to do with their political views.
Well there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest this was a mental health issue.
The thing is before evidence comes up we see the issue with reporting:
- if black it is gang activity until proven otherwise
- if brown it is terrorism until proven otherwise
- if white it is mental health until proven otherwise
ok but there is evidence now. For instance, the family has tried to have the perp checked into a mental hospital 2 dozen times over the last year
But Canada is in america.
north america
Yeah the same as the US and Mexico.
are you in north america? You may have a different dialect of english than north americans. This would explain the confusion. We do not consider ourselves americans, because american is the demonym of the US.
I’m in the US but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played games online and had someone chastise me because they were also from america. Its kinda funny how you can get upset about being reminded of that while all those people get upset about being excluded.
Ah. I’m not especially upset or anything, I am just trying to explain the difference in terminology.
I wasn’t implying you were upset. I just found it humorous how one person can see something one way and another person who lives close by you can see it exactly the opposite. Not that recent events haven’t altered that ratio.
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.
There was also an attack on the Afzaal family in London (Ontario) by a white nationalist with a pickup truck because they were visibly Muslim
They’re preemtively calling him radicalised, not realising how radicalised they’re themselves.
Cars are a terrorist threat! We should remove them from our streets.
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
Actually, I agree. Put them underground, in a tunnel, where people aren’t walking.
Walking > Bikes > Trains > Buses > fuck cars.
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.
Conservatives are a terrorist threat
FTFY
Maybe it’s time to revisit our car-centric lifestyle.
Do you normally bring up your political agenda at funerals and vigils?
Tbf that’s what everyone else does after a mass shooting, why wouldn’t c/fuckcars do the exact same thing? I expected it myself, especially considering how fanatical that comm is.
Your not wrong but this isn’t why.
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.
This is absolutely terrible.
Another car driver terrorist. When the new mobility plan happened in my city one of them rammed into a crowd of people because “he got so fed up with u turn and one ways”.
It got brushed out and hushed like now. “Mental health my balls”. This is vroomerism. Terrorism from the people who are afraid to lose their right to drive.
Retaliation will happen soon. If you know somebody who got killed by a car driver. Just avenge him.her.
“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.
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.
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
guncar issue; this is a mental health issue”. “You’re disgusting for trying to make thismass-shootingmass-ramming aboutgunscars; 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
nineeleven 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. 🥰
Root cause analysis. Do it or stay dumb. Adios.
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?
posting definitions at someone who appears more educated than yourself is straight middleschool behavior from you.
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
nineeleven people and injured twenty with their bare fists, so maybe middle-school behavior was too sophisticated.
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.
It’s not nessisarily skewing the narrative, it’s just not providing context. Terrorist acts have a narrow definition in Canadian law. This guy could be a spree killer motivated by racism but unless that killing is for premeditated ideological, religious or political reasons to coerce a specific result or change of policy from the population / Government it doesn’t fall under the definition.
No manifesto or claim of reasoning or connections found to groups that claim responsibility - no terrorist designation.
This is true, though the declaration being avoided is a wider set than just terrorism.
When I say skew I am not implying intent to mislead, just that paranoid interpretations by readers are kind of inevitable in such a situation.
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.
Is it a terrorist attack if it’s a mental health issue?
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.
ok so this is reminding me of “guns kill people” vs “people kill people.” In Canada we understand both are true. Drivers are a problem and carbrain culture is a problem and mental health issues are a problem.
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.
Good news, in those places a driver going off the road isn’t going to hit a crowd of people.
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.
Most of those places would work just fine with a combination of trains for long distance and bicycles/walking for local travel too.
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!
The elderly and disabled are exactly the people who are forgotten in a car centric society that assumes everyone can drive.
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?
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.
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.
A terrorist attack has a narrow definition in Canadian law where it is specifically part of a premeditated ideological, religious or political attempt to influence government policy or to intimidate a section of the public to a specific end. Basically if this guy didn’t have a manifesto or ever stated his reason within this rubric and was not part of a group that has specific aims then it follows under a regular old spree killer homicide unless it was racially motivated in which case it is also a hate crime.
Whether one uses cars or guns is not a factor in determining what counts as a terrorist act. The reporting on this has not been great ar clearing up this point.
Are you in the regular habit of bringing up your political agenda at funerals and vigils?
Where’s the funeral?
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.
Apparently it was mental health related, and he was apologizing when he came out of the car
I prefer to call them “Poilievre voters”
I’m going out on a limb here, but [NPC karma farming opinion]
… and you’d be wrong.
That’s quite racist of you. Great job.
Why are you defending these people? You must be a white conservative yourself, who hates Canada and says Trump to invade.
I don’t believe in pushing any stereotypes in aggregate. Just as I wouldn’t say he was a Chinese Commie who can’t drive.
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Video shows the person looks Asian. Probably conservative. I’d imagine a lot of Filipinos voted for Trump too.
EDIT: Filipinos. Not Filipino Canadians.
Going out on a limb that most of the Filipinos in that crowd didn’t vote for Trump, being that it happened in Canada
Filipinos, not Filipino Canadians.
I’d imagine a lot of Filipinos voted for Trump too.
Doubtful in Vancouver.
Now I’m curious as to how many people outside the US vote for American candidates as write-in votes.
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”
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
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.
What I’m suggesting is I am asking ChatGPT to validate my idea that all Filipinos have the same beliefs, wherever they are, almost as if their worldviews are entirely determined by their racial/ethnic origin.
Please stop and maybe read the things your write outloud before you post them…
Ditto.
And yeah, Filipinos are very catholic so it would make sense that they lean conservative.
Talk about a pick me gesture; I guess he’s trying to prove he’s “one of the good ones.”
JFC CANADA?! Get your shit together!
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.
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
gunscars at a time like this? I can’t believe you’re using this tragicmass-shootingmass-ramming to soapbox aboutguncar regulation. This isn’t the time to talk about how we letgunscars be so dangerous and how the direct result was thisshootingramming. The real cause of this was a mental health crisis. Society needsgunscars toprotect ourselvesget around. What do you mean, ‘Do I ever bring up this mental health crisis outside ofmass-shootingsmass-rammings?’ Uhh…”On guns in the US you might want to watch these three:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BxvxbZGjlv4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxtuQxUz8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QbXTDuwSVkkIt’s a tad more complicated than “gun bad” or “car bad”.
Every first-world country that has tight regulation shows an astronomical decrease in gun deaths from the US. It’s not more complicated; regulation works, and the more regulated guns are, proportionally the fewer deaths.
No shit Sherlock.
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.
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.
Why would you guess? You can literally just look it up. It’s all over the news.
Because confirmation bias is a superior substitute to basic research, how else would one inform themselves about the world?
/s
