Just because a tool is popular, doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for the job.
As I write this, we still don’t know what happened in Wakesha, WI nor why it happened. But if we’re paying attention, we do know something that gun rights advocates have been arguing for years… if your goal is to do a lot of damage in a short period of time, a gun is a poor tool for the job.
Terrorists like to use guns because people are frightened by them and while killing people is certainly a part of any terrorist act, the real point of terrorism is to terrify people who weren’t there… to spread fear throughout an entire population.
But cars are not inherently scary. Every American has been inside a car and I would guess that almost every American has either witnessed a car crash or been a part of one. I often walk along the roadside with cars zipping by inches away at 50 or 60 miles per hour, and never ever give it a second thought.
But most Americans have little or no experience with guns. Just the appearance of a gun in public is likely to be terrifying to most people, and would certainly provoke an instant reaction. But as we saw in some of the videos released from Waukesha last night, most people filming the car as it drove through the crowd did not react until the danger was long past. One person kept their phone rolling for several seconds as the car bore down on them and zipped past a little girl with inches to spare. The person behind the camera made no move to get out of the way or pull the girl to safety because, hey, it’s just a car, right?
Quick, without running to Google, what’s the worst mass shooting in American history? The answer is the Las Vegas Country Music Festival shooting which killed 61 over the course of about ten minutes. But the Vegas shooting was a very rare anomaly. In terms of body count, no other incident comes close to Vegas.
Now compare that to the 2016 Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice where a terrorist drove a panel truck into a large holiday crowd. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel managed to kill 84 people in just a few seconds. But that’s the thing about vehicles attacks, you don’t even have to try very hard to do a lot of damage. In 2003 an old man lost control of his car and plowed into a farmer’s market in Santa Monica California. He wound up killing 10 people without even meaning to.
There is a farmer’s market in West L.A. that I attend on the regular. It’s a crowded market and I have never once worried that someone might show up with a gun. Know what I do worry about? The market sits at the bottom of a half-mile-long gradually sloping downhill run. A bad guy in a rented van could be doing well over 100 miles-per-hour by the time he plowed into the crowd at the market.
That’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
And despite what gun controls activists will tell you, it’s a lot easier to obtain a vehicle in America than it is to acquire a gun.
Early reports have identified the perpetrator of the attack in Waukesha as a man with a long criminal history. It’s unlikely that this man would have been able to pass the background check required to legally obtain a gun. And yet the same man was in possession of what looks like a fairly nice red Ford Escape. And whatever the motive, the results speak for themselves.
There is still a lot to learn about the Waukesha attack and I won’t speculate about it here, but I will say that we should all hope that future terrorists don’t learn the most critical lesson (so far) of this incident… that motor vehicles have the potential to do much more damage in a shorter period of time, than any civilian-ownded gun on Earth.