The Use of Trucks as Hate Crimes

In North Dakota, a man has run down and killed another, claiming that the dead man was a "Republican extremist." 
Brandt admitted to consuming alcohol before the incident, and stated he hit Ellingson with his car because he had a political argument with him. Brandt also admitted to deputies that he initially left the crash scene, then returned to call 911, but left again before deputies could arrive.
This reminds me of a Wisconsin incident in 2020, in which a man used his truck to murder a motorcyclist on the assumption that he was a Republican and Trump supporter, and therefore a racist of some sort surely.
[Sheriff] Waldschmidt said Navarro told detectives he targeted Thiessen because he was riding a Harley and “in Wisconsin white people drive Harley-Davison motorcycles and that the Harley culture is made up of white racists."... “Navarro said that if President Donald Trump and white people are going to create the world we are living in he has no choice and that people are going to have to die,” Waldschmidt said.
Of course it also reminds me of the Nice, France murders by an Islamist who killed 86 people and injured several hundred more. Gun massacres get all the media attention, but they rarely kill a dozen people; the largest in American history, the Vegas one where the guy was in a barricaded room at an elevated position over a very large crowd of people who could not seek cover, killed only fifty. Trucks are both more ubiquitous and more dangerous, but they cannot be banned from cities because they are absolutely necessary to the survival of cities. 

Be careful out there.

5 comments:

Christopher B said...

Also Waukesha, WI if you count SUV as a form of truck.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Trucks are also used by the military, proving how dangerous they are. Did you know that you can buy a truck from an unlicensed dealer, with no background check required? Fewer people drive trucks in Europe, and you see how much safer they are there.

Grim said...

Man, you’re on a roll today.

Thos. said...

People talk about how close we may or may not be to a second Civil War. Usually, I'm not convinced that they have any idea what that even means.

Those first two examples are exactly what the next American Civil War is going to be like. Just like that, only more (lots more).

In fact, if we do have another civil war, some future historians will write papers about these examples and argue over whether they were pre-war incidents, or that they were actually part of the long and very slow early stages of fighting.

douglas said...

We were very lucky that AQ greatly preferred the theater of loud bangs over more numerous, easily effective terror events of smaller scale. That would have been a nightmare.