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I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.
Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.
Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.
It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.
I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.
This was a popular method back when ISIS was still called ISIS; some guy in France managed to kill over 100 people doing that a few years ago. It's possible to do this serially to random people in crosswalks as well; some guy in Quebec did that a while back, too.
It's easier, trivial even, and this works in all countries. To get a large vehicle, you go to a U-Haul or your local car rental desk (which is where at least one of the vehicles used in the events described above came from, if not both). Worst case, you need a driver's license and don't have one.
Probably. These people are more interested in Sending a Message (and simply picking targets of opportunity) and basically just screw around lighting rounds off in the general direction of their targets until the cops shoot them (body count rises as the cops delay); things like "raw body count" and "the suitability of one's firearm to this task" tend to be secondary considerations, to put it lightly.
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You might be thinking of Darrell Edward Brooks Jr -- you will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article, and For Some Reason nobody has heard nearly as much about him deliberately driving his own SUV into a Christmas parade and killing several as they have about the Charlottesville guy. (who killed one person in a hostile crowd of counterprotestors, arguably semi-accidentally)
I remember this, the infamous "a car" which drove into a Christmas parade. Cars typically have drivers, don't they? Did a self-driving car experience a HAL-9000 moment?
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Was that a deliberate attempt to kill pedestrians (terrorism) or just complete reckless disregard in the heat of the moment? The degree of premeditation wasn't clear to me from what I read of the press coverage at the time.
There was also the 2014 incident at SXSW that killed 2 and injured 23, although that seemed to be reckless disregard while fleeing police, rather than ideologically motivated.
Not sure if it makes a difference to me in terms of the relevant criminal punishments, but it seems like it would be relevant for trying to categorize similar events.
It appeared to be both. He'd just had some violent confrontation and was likely in a state of mind where he just wanted to break things (and children and grannies), but also he drove through parade barriers with people waving for him to stop, and on video both swerved into people and sped up into them.
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I didn't follow the trial livestream, but seem to recall testimony indicating that he was deliberately swerving at people trying to get out of his way (also IIRC there was no police pursuit until after he drove through the parade?) -- seems more like 'going postal' than terrorism to me, but well beyond reckless disregard.
(with the additional spice that the Waukesha Christmas Parade is probably the whitest thing ever, so if one decided to go postal on white people specifically it would be a sensible target -- I don't think 'hate crime' enhancements were pursued though?)
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Edit history suggests that it's a licensing issue. If you can find a photo with an appropriate license you should add it.
It seems like a mug shot meets the criteria in other cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump
This image has an extensive licensing section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_mug_shot.jpg
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That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).
What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?
"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.
The licensing issue with the previous photo appears to be that there was no license on it.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=355493040
Yes, police departments do not typically license their mugshots -- this does not mean that they aren't in the public domain.
Mugshots probably don't even meet the requirements for originality. It's a low bar, but it's not zero.
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It is not generally the case that works of state and local governments are public domain.
Even if the photo in question was in the public domain, it's still required to indicate this on the photo (example). Having no license on a file is not the same as having a PD license on it.
The equivalent article for Charlottesville uses a the work of a newspaper photographer who literally won a Pulitzer for it -- reduced in resolution, relying on fair use I presume. Does WM really think that the Waukesha Sheriff's department is more likely to sue for infringement than an actual news photographer?
I'm not an expert on Wikipedia policy, but I would suspect that likelihood of being sued is not a consideration when evaluating if a photo should have a license attached or not.
As far as I can tell, the policy is very simple - photos must have a license. Happy to be corrected if I'm overlooking some policy details here.
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This is the go-to excuse wikipedians use when they want to memoryhole something. They also used it to attempt to delete the Trump Raised Fist photo. Of course, this is just a pretext, as the solution is widely used on wikipedia: reduce the resolution of the photo.
This photo continues to exist, so it seems that in this particular example the tactic is not working.
They still tried it and it appears to be working for Brooks...
There has been pretty well documented examples of the politicization of wikipedia. Why would it be different, in this case?
It's not "working" because the trump photo deletion attempt is for "invalid fair use" rather than a lack of a license. That's a totally different argument, and sure, I can believe that it's not always applied in good faith. A license being totally absent is pretty black and white.
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For those who don’t know, this guy’s trial got live-streamed. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He represented himself, made a gigantic fool of himself, and constantly interrupted the proceedings with insane legal theories. The best part was the judge couldn’t do anything about it. Normally you would hold somebody like that in contempt of court, but this guy was already in jail, and already facing down almost certain life without parole. Holding him in contempt would have done nothing except delay the inevitable, so everyone had to just sit there and take it for weeks.
He was a black supremacist sovereign citizen. I suspect, based on police statements that sovereign citizens are a major threat but also the relative lack of sovereign citizens in the news, that these ideas go together very frequently,
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The judge did plenty, though granted him a whole lot of leeway. Eventually he ended up having to attend the trial from a separate room via videoconference so that he could be muted when he wouldn't behave.
This was a fun watch. The guy was a Soverign Citizen, and a small corner of Reddit went nuts with it. "Estoppel" became a catchphrase. I just checked and it's actually still quite active: https://old.reddit.com/r/DarrellBrooksJr/
“Grounds?”
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I still audibly chuckle every time I hear the phrase “subject-matter jurisdiction”.
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It's hilarious how some websites light up his picture as much as possible in an attempt to make him seem white.
RIP my retinas
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The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.
Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman
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Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack?useskin=vector
Dont you mean the "alleged Waukesha holiday parade incident caused by an SUV"?
The headlines for that were beyond parody. I wonder if all the arguments are still on the wiki talk page, or stuck in an archive. There was a level of shamelessness in the propaganda reached in 2020-2022 that seems almost unreal now, like a fever dream.
The article still includes:
Through the "shamelessness", to use your accurate term, is so off the charts, it may have been added by trolls seeking to discredit ADL. It certainly lowers my opinion of this anti-antisemitism organization to see it defending an antisemitic murderer, by pining of the label of "antisemite" onto his critics.
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Ya
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First case that brought this tactic into "public consciousness" I'm aware of is the Nice truck attack of 2016, it triggered a bunch of copycats to the point where, for a while, any European hearing "vehicle drives into crowd" would have "oh, another Islamist terrorist attack" as his first thought.
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