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(TM)." 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.