Friday, August 18, 2017

Cars Are Deadly Weapons

This isn't my usual car thing, just for many many years I've wondered, mostly to myself, but rarely on this sucky blog, "why don't terrorists who are willing to die just run people over with cars and buses and even big trucks?" "Willingness to die" is what really makes terrorism scary. That's the part that makes it hard to prevent. Gotta be crafty to do something without getting "caught." Easy to do just about anything if you don't care much.

Hijacking planes is hard. Making bombs correctly and setting them up to be especially dangerous is pretty hard. Not incredibly hard, but you gotta work at it a bit. Running people over with large vehicles is really easy.

I wondered it mostly to myself because I thought, "how the hell do people not know this?" I was a bit scared to say it out loud because... what if this is some big secret that only I am aware of? That's silly, I know, but the fact that it wasn't a regular occurrence, to the extent the terrorist attacks were regular occurrences (not so regular in non-war zones, though that requires a digression into how we define terrorism, but they happen), confused me.

But now they're a thing. That's bad, and I have absolutely no idea what to do about it from a security perspective. I suspect it isn't that big of a deal compared to the number of non-terrorism (as we define these things) gun deaths we have in the US, but in Europe they don't have the guns. My point is not "OH MY GOD THE CARS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL." My point is...yah, really, there's nothing to be done about it.