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Notes -
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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