Large vehicles have existed for nearly a hundred years, but only in about the last ten has someone figured out that you can effectively weaponize them against a crowd and rack up a death count in line with that of a gun.
I could postulate that this directly follows from the airing of a Mythbusters episode where Adam and Jamie infinitely plow a large truck through an arena of parked cars. A murderous mind, seeing that video, might quickly realize that with the correct vehicle, you will not get bogged down by human bodies, no matter how large the sea of people.
I don’t that to be true, but certainly we can say that this is a vector for the germination of the idea.
Now, personally, if I close my eyes and think about it (and no, Misses FBI Agent, you don’t need to come ask me questions), I have no trouble envisioning novel, as yet unused methods of causing large scale death, at the hands of a single individual. I purposely decline from mentioning them because the thing that most saves us from them at the moment is the fact that most people are not very clever nor imaginative. If monkey is aware of something he can feasibly do, then monkey do. Otherwise, monkey does not.
Methods of killing are an evolutionary process. It takes some time until the desire to kill hits an individual who does have sufficient creativity and who has had exposure to something, like the Mythbusters, that would give him the genesis of the idea that will allow him to kill in a novel way that society is not guarding against.
Once that person comes along and proves the idea and the media reports on that success, evolution has found a path forward to keep the species known as “killing lots of folks” alive. And unlike a real creature, the only way to kill the species is to prevent knowledge of that technique from spreading. In our day and age, that is not going to be possible.
In the realm of suicide, there is a phenomenon known as “suicide contagion”. When one person - e.g. a student in a school - commits suicide, this is often followed by a number of other students also ending their lives in the same region.
These are people who were inclined to commit suicide already but maybe didn’t know whether certain techniques would work, they hadn’t seen the doting praise and love that is spent on the deceased, they hadn’t seen someone muster up the courage to go for it, etc. The person who, previously, only mulled the idea of death now has concrete evidence and motivation to go forward, and so they do.
And while it may seem like, “Well certainly that person will just one day go ahead with killing themselves anyway. This has simply impacted the time and place.” I sort of doubt the truth of that. Generally hormones lessen with age and usually lives stabilize and become more peaceful as the years go on.
Now, if I go to school, I may well receive training in how to deal with an active shooter, who is assumed to be one of my fellow students. That training teaches me how to most effectively counter the shooter, but conversely it provides a student who was merely considering how much he hates his life and all of the other students with a concrete lesson that, hey, this is a thing that can be done, that is commonplace enough that you may as well dump it into your everyday thought process, and (in inverse), the exact steps for going about it.
We also see, in the land of serial killers, a propensity for others to begin copy-catting the murderer, based on news reporting.
If you go onto YouTube, there is an infinite supply of videos on how to make things via 3D printing, chemistry, robotistry, AI, machine learning, etc.
If you go onto the Internet, there is an ample supply of locations for people to go and find others who consider it a good idea to kill oneself or others, trade tips, ideas, and videos.
Killing people is not hard. The genie has been out of the bottle on that one for a good long while now and it is not going back. Shutting down one vector of technical feasibility may, for a brief period, decrease the numbers of deaths that are the result of a human’s desire for someone to die. But it could just as well spur the path of inventiveness door something worse and harder to police to come into being.
This is far less a problem of tools of death than it is a problem of human desire, human creativity, and the spread and normalization of knowledge.
The things that we can maybe do something about in those paths are:
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To limit the knowledge, e.g. by requesting that the mass media not report on suicides, mass killings, serial killings, etc. and by not mentioning it training students and everyday workers for active shooters.
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Find ways to reduce the human impulse to kill, through economics, medical care, early detection of suicidal/murderous intent combined with laws that allow us to deal with these people pre-crime, and (potentially) gene-line modification.
If we really care about preventing deaths along these lines then dealing with the tools, in the age of the Internet and 3D printing, is not a viable, safe, nor sufficient path.
Humans are just big water balloons. Despite your belief in your resilience, the reality is that a thumbtack is enough to end you forever. We’re just not that hard to kill and technology is progressing at a far faster rate than human nature.