Avoiding Mass Vehicular Homicide, by R.D.J.
“…The act of intentionally or unintentionally causing multiple deaths through the use of a vehicle. This can occur in various ways, including deliberate attacks, reckless driving, or accidents caused by negligence or impaired driving…”
In this article we are not talking about accidental vehicular casualties, and Lord knows there are far too many of them in everyday life. No, we are talking about the deaths and injuries that result from someone deliberately driving a vehicle, statistically usually a car but occasionally a much more deadly and difficult-to-stop truck, into pedestrians either on either side of the street or occasionally in an area or precinct not supposed to be frequented by vehicles at all.
And bad examples are recent: on New Year’s Day, 2025, a man drove a truck at high speed into a crowd in New Orleans, Louisiana, killing 14 and injuring about 60 others. Barely a year earlier, on December 20, 2024, a man drove a sedan into a crowded market area in Magdeburg, Germany; accelerating all the while for about 400 yards before coming to a stop and being apprehended. 6 people died and ~300 were injured.
The statistical chance of this happening to anyone of us is even less than winning the lottery – but, people still become lottery winners, as long as they buy tickets.
We do need to understand both the physics of the attack and the lack of protection we can deploy on a personal and family level, against such an attack. If someone is driving 30 miles per hour then whatever they’re driving is moving at 44 feet per second and if the only thing that is stopping or slowing them is you and your family, then the odds of them surviving killing you are really, really high. The Kinetic Energy of an object, as we learned in school, is half the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity: if they are running even an empty U-Haul 26′ truck they got themselves 13,000 lb of empty weight to batter and ram with. Even if we have everyday carry (EDC) gear, wear a plate carrier, and don a carnival-colors-painted bone-dome we are gonna be history just as much as anybody else.
And it’s going to be harder to get out of the way precisely because they’ll be ramming a crowd and even if we see the vehicular problem coming – and we’ll probably be alerted not by revving engine noise but by screaming – our avoidance may be stopped or greatly slowed by all the other bodies around us who haven’t got our sense of awareness.
Research tells us that vehicle ramming became the most lethal terrorist attack method in 2016; the too-softly-named “Counter Extremism Project” published a report this year that documented 83 such attacks that resulted in 261 deaths and close to 1,500 injuries. Between 1970 and 2019, there were just over 800 fatalities and 1,800 injuries from 257 such attacks. In their twisted minds, a strategy that works is something worth doing again.
The American Journal of Criminal Justice noted in a recently published study that “Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine published “The Ultimate Mowing Machine” in 2010. This provided guidance on maximizing casualties through vehicle attacks. Similarly, following the Nice incident, ISIS’s Rumiyah magazine (2016, 2017) explicitly encouraged the use of trucks and all-terrain vehicles, providing detailed instructions
on selecting targets and planning attacks to maximise casualties.” Well, now.
Accelerating a few thousand pounds of metal into crowds results in all of the injuries you’d expect – head, chest, spine – and then driving over people who have fallen, been trampled or who have already been driven over, will rapidly result in more severe and usually lethal crush injuries. And some people who might otherwise survive will die because one of the calculated secondary effects of these incidents is to temporarily, deliberately overwhelm all casualty retrieval, transport and treatment methods in the immediate vicinity. In a number of cases, ambulances which arrive to retrieve the injured and dying have been kept away because security forces are unclear whether the imminent danger is over even if they have arrested or rendered one perpetrator otherwise harmless…
So the First Rule for avoiding your loved ones and you getting run over by some psycho in a teatowel is by abiding by the Prime Directive Ol’ Remus (R.I.P.): Stay Away From Crowds. It’s not that you can’t get solo-run-down by some idiot with a grudge in a Walmart parking lot or when standing in a fast food queue; but the chances are far less.
It’s not foolish to choose not to be an integral part of a big slow-moving and therefore vulnerable crowd especially in a city centre where everybody is channelled and funnelled into what in that terrible context is an excellent killing ground. If however you do choose to or need to attend such an event, there are a number of basic precautions you could take which are not physically disruptive to your plans and which are more likely to leave you and your loved ones as horrified bystanders than direct victims.
Second Rule: Stay On The Outskirts / edges of a crowd so that you retain some freedom of sudden movement if things go badly wrong. This can also be advantageous for when other problems arise, entirely unrelated to terrorism. [JWR Adds: It is worth noting that spontaneous trampling deaths by crowds (“crowd crushes“) statistically rival vehicle attacks. So, if you cannot avoid a crowd, then staying at the edge of a crowd, but away from roadways and away from “fatal funnel” chokepoints is probably the safest tactic.]
Third Rule: Be Fleet Of Foot. Wear good shoes, maintain a degree of physical fitness, and if you do have younger and vulnerable children, then arrange it so that you can either run carrying them or run pushing them fast in an all-terrain-equivalent ‘stroller’.
Fourth Rule: Be Unburdened By What Is Unnecessary. Either don’t carry or pack or buy a whole lot of stuff that you don’t really need, or be mentally not just physically prepared to unstrap it, shrug it off, and dump it now and run with your loved ones for their lives. Anything that is not attached you by skin, ligaments, blood vessels and bones you by definition don’t need to survive. That is all replaceable.
Fifth Rule: Reject The Screen. It’s impossible to maintain good situational awareness if you are taking selfies, videoing a parade, following Google Map directions, or web-searcling any other pixel-focused distractions. Heck, it’s impossible to maintain any significant situational awareness. If you must walk around with your PhoneDrug, at least put it in a pocket and let your significant and less significant others do the screen thing. It’s a darn good idea to have a paper map as a backup in case during and after the event, everybody making emergency calls – or the perps – themselves crash the mobile phone system… One family I know each carry an AirTag – in the case of children, sewn into their jackets or glued into their shoes – which shows on all other family members their children’s and siblings locations so that in the event they get separated they can find each other quickly. That does rely of course on functioning networks, but it’s not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.
Sixth Rule: Scan for Proximate / Transient BOLs. If you are despite your precautions on a street or in a constrained open space such as a piazza or around a fountain, and someone decides to inflict vehicular mayhem, be visually aware of short stairways running up to someone’s front door, or have the mindset to decide to pick up your little ones and jump into the fountain itself – i.e. look for close architecture that will protect you against a multi-ton fast-moving mass. Bollards won’t necessarily do it; the average bollard that is removably mounted near a street or plaza tends to meet only ASTM Standard (a standard for testing bollards with a surrogate vehicle of no more than 5,000 lbs). M-rated bollards collect ratings varying according to the size and weight of the vehicle during testing, so an M30 bollard is supposed to stop a 15,000 lb truck; and well it might, but I’m pretty sure that none of us are going to be examining the bollards for their specs at the same time as a truck is bearing down on us and we try to figure out whether it’s 10,000 or 20,000 lb.
Truly high-security bollards are engineered to stop trucks weighing well over 15,000 lb at speeds well over 50 miles an hour. But those are not the sort of bollards that will be protecting us peasantry; they tend to go in front of various establishments where the politicians publicly congregate. (If you’re interested in bollards for your own property, always add a concrete core inside a removable or permanent bollard because a concrete-core bollard, coupled with a deep ground anchor (2 feet+) increases the same-profile-bollard’s protection by a couple of hundred percent, minimum.)
Seventh Rule: Scatter, Don’t Gawk. A number of the mass vehicle homicides have included drivers that also carried firearms or bladed weapons and then when they exit the vehicle they decide to get stuck in and kill a few more people, preferably (as usual for these types) the vulnerable, the young, the women and children. Unless it is your job, don’t be near them, be far away. You have your own family to protect. Once your family are secured and safe and you decide to go back to the front line, whether it’s to protect others or to help medically or even just transport casualties, may God go with you.
Eighth Rule: Consider the Lesser of Two Evils. If someone is driving down a waterfront path trying to kill as many people as possible on that path, it may well be considerably safer to jump or walk into the water as quickly as you can, than to try and run inland. If there is a big parking structure really close by, you know you’ll be able to enter it easily whereas you may not be able to find refuge in shuttered shops and offices especially on an evening or a weekend. And particularly in city centres, sometimes all you need to do is to take two quick lefts or to quick rights to get out of vision or range.
Ninth Rule: If You Have to Run – Run, Don’t Think. If something is happening that is causing tens or hundreds of people to scream and shout and run for their lives, let’s not get paralysed by analysis, let’s get mobile. And let’s do our running at an angle, we’re not running towards the problem, but we’re not gonna run away in front of it either. We’re going to turn a sharp left or a sharp right and get behind and far from the vehicle so that we are nowhere in front of it, regardless of what it does next.
Tenth Rule: like a firearm in the hands of a terrorist, The Vehicle is Just The Weapon; the driver is the one doing the damage. If there are ways of avoiding the vehicle best to start with them; it’s not your job to disable the vehicle and certainly not your job to try to slow it down with your own self. The best ways to immediately disable a civilian vehicle are not what we are shown in the movies; tire spikes won’t do it, people can drive on rims for literal miles.
If you get warning that someone is heading your way with intent to ram and damage, then of course you get out of their way and yes, if you have a good community of like-minded serious people to help you, there are various things you can do to stop a ram attack. Degrading the speed of a Ramming Vehicle is the best result if you can’t shut down the driver and you can’t block the vehicle with a bigger vehicle of your own; but all the ways to slow purposefully-driven vehicles that aren’t susceptible to small arms fire, take time, effort, mass, equipment, and teamwork.
Conclusion
Refer to Rule One again: Stay Away From Crowds because in this context there is you, there is the vehicle, there’s the driver; and three is a crowd.
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