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Yeah this is stressful.
Tangentially related, and this will probably result in me being put on a list, but I'm always mystified when I read/hear/whatever about a mass shooter who kills like 5 people and then kills themselves/gets shot in a Walmart in their town or whatever.
If you're planning on dying, and hate the world and want to extract revenge on it. Why not go to your nearest sporting event/concert and wait for it to let out? Or rent a car, drive to New York, and unload in a PACKED subway station at 8:30am on a Tuesday.
It seems like so many of them leave so much carnage on the table (which is their goal?), but I guess this is likely mostly answered by the fact that people who try to commit mass shootings aren't highly competent utility maximizers.
Who says they hate the world equally? Maybe they hate the people nearer to them more? Also, as a more practical matter, shooting up a local Walmart is easy to plan; you've probably been there a bunch of times. And there's no waiting where someone can notice you standing around and possibly question you.
Hitting the NYC subway is even less likely; even if they only care about body count, what do they know about the subway? I mean, I know two stations where that would work well (if you didn't mind getting killed or caught), but I use the subway regularly. Somebody from suburbia or flyoverville has no idea what the subway is like. As with "write what you know", "kill where you know" is probably "good" advice.
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This is what was so concerning about Islamic terror attacks in the early 2000's. It was a group of people willing to think rationally about killing and causing a bunch of damage. They used box cutters and a few flying lessons to kill thousands of people in a day and cause massive damage in New York City.
I do remember people trying to war game potential avenues for future terrorist attacks where there might be low hanging fruit. It quickly got depressing. The Western world mostly functions and operates on the assumption that everyone is not trying to cause massive damage and death to those around them. The water supply, electric grids, transportation infrastructure, etc are all vulnerable to determined saboteurs. Massive crowds of people in unsecured areas are common in every city every day. Explosives materials are monitored, but anyone can walk up to a gas station and buy a fire accelerant with cash.
It's always surprised me that there are so few mass casualty events; I could name two or three attacks that would kill a thousand plus. I don't know if those targets are non-obviously hardened in a way that would prevent a successful attack, or if my estimate of the number of extremely violent/insane people in society is off by an order of magnitude.
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Yeah the brief rash of van/car attacks into city crowds concerned me a lot. I usually have a pretty rational assessment of gun crime/terrorism (I'm not involved in the drug trade, so my likelihood of being shot is very low, and terrorism is in general so rare it's not worth stressing over especially as I'm not American).
But the van attacks were genuinely scary to me. Canada may not have much gun violence, but we have a LOT of cars. And random acts of sidewalk violence with a car was all of a sudden a quite plausible threat in my life. I stopped wearing headphones when walking around as a result of this, which while I am no longer worried about getting van'd, I still do as the additional situational awareness is never a bad thing.
That's also what got me thinking about terrorism optimization, even the van attack guy in Toronto could have probably increased his kill count by a factor of 10x if he did it down Bay Street at 8:45am, versus somewhere way out of the core of Toronto where he actually did it.
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