On New Year’s Day in New Orleans, on a famous stretch of road known as Bourbon Street, a US citizen used a rented pickup truck to kill twenty people and wound many more. This mass casualty event – we can’t say mass shooting because the only individual to die from gunfire was the perp when police shot and killed him – was a mass vehicular homicide.
It was made possible because the usual barricades designed to prevent this had been fired (removed to be replaced), and the “new guys” had not yet arrived.
The suspect in the NOLA attack has a Middle Eastern name, an IED (in a cooler full of nails), and an ISIS flag on his truck, but he’s a US citizen from Texas and an Army Veteran, according to reports—so this is alleged homegrown terrorism. Some guy radicalized by MSNBC, and that dude ‘Al Jazeera.’ There’s no evidence yet to support this, but give it time.
A second vehicle detonated outside a Trump hotel in Vegas (do we really need the ‘Las’?) a few hours later, sending Musk haters into a tizzy. A Tesla Cybertruck contained most of the destruction, killing the alleged perp, who was also US military but from Colorado, where there is evidence of Venezuelan gangs seizing private property but no evidence of Islamofacist indoctrination, but he is a suspected Democrat voter, so that’s – as they say – “close enough for ‘remote’ government work.”
Matthew Livelsberger’s life ended when he failed to exit the vehicle before it exploded.
It detonated before he could get out, as soon as the car reached the curb in front of Trump’s hotel. In theory, a Tesla Cybertruck could be operated by remote control, although that isn’t a standard feature. So, again in theory, Livelsberger could have been dead before the vehicle arrived. There’s no evidence to support this theory, and there never will be.
Well, maybe that’s not quite right. Matt’s special forces and military intelligence background ensured he could have planned a much more sophisticated attack than this botched bombing, an amateur effort that went nowhere, not least of all because of the Cybertruck’s durable stainless steel construction, which appears to have contained much of the force of the explosion and limited the worst damage to its occupant.
Aside from trucks and dying, both shared another commonality.
Both Matthew Livelsberger and Shamsud Din Jabbar (how much more Texas can you get than that) used the peer-to-peer rental app Turo to obtain the murder weapon (suicice I the case of cybertruck Matty). Turo allows private individuals to rent their vehicles to other private individuals. I’m unfamiliar with the process and wondering what their insurers thought when the news broke, but shouldn’t Democrats be screaming bloody something about common sense laws? Vehicle owners can just hand over the keys to “potential” murderers in any old parking lot somewhere with no background check!
It’s as if you can trust anyone with a driver’s license to handle or use another person’s registered vehicle, even if they just want to take it for a test drive, tool around a parking lot, or move it in the driveway.
Is it time for “common sense” car and truck rental background checks?
I’ve not heard a peep about that just yet, but had Shamsud Din Jabbar – who did fire at police before they killed him – show up on foot carrying an AR-15, all the way from Texas, to kill people in New Orleans (ostensibly for ISIS) while wounding many more we’d be having a loud conversation about the weapon, access to it, and not the perpetrator unless it was a white, Christian, Male, in a MAGA hat. Not a transmale but the real thing.
Matthew (Not So A) Livelsberger just killed himself, but that’d count ‘cuz it is technically a suicide by cybertruck. He doesn’t even appear to have busted the glass on the doors to the hotel. Was he thinking of the Oklahoma City Bombing because that didn’t work out, and he’s too crispy to know how badly it failed?
In case you missed the sarcasm, I’m not serious about the background check for the rental car thing. Next, we’d have red flag laws for the elderly, and who knows what after that? But why not, Democrats? Cars kill lots of people annually, typically with the owner behind the wheel. Is it because private citizens owning cars and trucks is not a serious threat to an unaccountable, tyrannical government?
No vehicles were used as part of the alleged J6 “insurrection,” which means about as much as no one being armed.
And while I know many a proglodyte hates trucks, and too many want us out of private vehicles altogether, at the end of the day, you can kill people with just about anything without much protest about the weapon from the left (‘cuz they hate people) unless it is a weapon that stands between them and controlling you.
