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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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?
You hate cars more than you hate people dying. That’s probably why you don’t like to dive too deep into mental health.
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.the “security you feel” is textbook Dunning-Kruger Syndrome
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.
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.
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.
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?