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In the wake of the worst mass-killing in Vancouver’s history, we must ask the question: why is it so easy to do this?

Like many people in my home city of Vancouver, BC, I’m still grappling with the events of April 26, 2025. The mass-murder, by vehicle-ramming, of 11 people and the critical injury of dozens more at our annual Lapu Lapu street festival.

A single person, in a normal SUV, did this. Although the investigation is ongoing, there seems little doubt it was intentional. No clear motive at this time. No ideology identified. Just chaos and death.

We are grief-stricken.

This type of stuff doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. In 2018, 10 people were killed and another 16 injured in the infamous Toronto van attack. This one was also a lone psychopath, however, this time motivated by a hatred of women.

But to a lesser and different extent, it does happen often.

Case in point, two days after the horrors of Lapu Lapu day in Vancouver, four students were killed in Illinois when a driver crashed their vehicle into an after-school program.

Or a few years back, in Laval, Quebec, when a bus driver in a psychotic state killed two toddlers and injured six others at a daycare.

I’m not going to list every other instance where multiple people were killed by a vehicle. Nor will I try to connect motives or mindsets between the the varying ways it happens—ranging from terrorism, to mental health, to driver negligence.

What I’m asking is: why is it so easy? Why is it so easy for someone to just “go nuts” and commit mass murder? Or “lose control of their car” and mass-kill?

In Canada, we don’t allow folks to walk around with assault rifles for this reason. In many jurisdictions, we even have laws against certain types of knives.

But a car? For mass-murderers, it’s the ultimate loophole. And for others? You could kill half-a-dozen pedestrians because you looked at your phone.

Now, we could do stuff about this.

If you wanna get wild—we could reduce pedestrian deaths to near-zero by installing pop-up bollards around every crosswalk, permanent bollards on every sidewalk and invest in mobile barricades for every event.

The latter—mobile barricades—is likely going to happen, at least in Vancouver.

The two former items? They’d cost billions of dollars. Never gonna happen. It is an indictment to our priorities… the occasional person getting killed at a crosswalk ain’t worth billions, folks.

People are proposing the installation of a “billion bollards.” But—cruelly—one of the biggest pushbacks is the damage they may do to peoples’ cars. Think about that for a second.

I wish I had the answer. But all I have is the question—why is it so easy… to kill… with cars?

And are we going to do anything about it?