But the old guy didn’t get out of his vehicle and shoot people he hadn’t already manage to kill, which is what is being reported tonight.
75 dead now and 50 injured. I heard there were a lot of young people in the crowd.
This is just sickening. My heart is hurting.
This is fucking terrible. No place is safe. Paris, Orlando, Nice. The driver was killed by police, but a second gunman is at large. Whether ISIS is involved or not, these mass killings seem to be a result of a nasty kind of hatred.
According to French media, there is no second perpetrator. It was a single driver who was killed by police. I imagine they are busy now with the identification.
I’m a little surprised that thing wasn’t packed with explosives.
There are reports of firearms and explosives in the truck.
Those of us who use dark humor to cope with tragedy have to be careful about doing so in a public forum where it won’t always be well received.
Most of it seems to have been just driving a semi-tractor through a dense crowd. If you can’t get out of the way of such a vehicle… yeah, bad.
Right now there’s a lot of confused stuff coming out of Nice, between the authorities not knowing who is doing this, why, and lots of eye-witnesses broadcasting on social media with a less than comprehensive knowledge of the overall situation. I expect some of what’s being reported will be found inaccurate and more solid information will come within the next 24-48 hours.
There were grenades in the truck.
I mean big boom. Think McVeigh.
Horrible, horrible.
Stupid question, but why are the crazies targeting the French?
Because, for the most part, the “crazies” in question are French. They may be of immigrant background, but AFAIK the perpetrators of the Bataclan attacks all had either French or Belgian citizenship, and I’d be very surprised if the perpetrator of the Nice attack didn’t too.
They are killing their countrymen because they are French? There’s got to be another reason beside the fact that they were all born in the same place.
They are paying a high price for many years of immigration. The Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian clerics lived there in exile before the Iranian revolution. That’s lead to France having a significant radical Muslim population. Along with moderate Muslims.
There is a large and predominantly immigrant community of socially and economically disenfranchised in France. This community is particularly vulnerable to religious and political radicalization, and indeed, the vast majority of the perpetrators of these sorts of attacks (at least to my knowledge) in the last few years have previously completed “tours of duty” with ISIS in Syria or Iraq before returning to their countries of origin and committing acts of terror.
If a such community that was disenfranchised to a similar degree existed anywhere else in Europe, I would expect similarly many attacks of a similar scale.
As a general rule, criminals are lazy. Even suicidal/murderous ones.
Someone who was actually motivated by his calling, and in his life, would kill a lot more people, without dying, through more clever means in a wider variety of locations. Fortunately, most extremists are incompetent and not terribly motivated.
You get someone like Mao Zedung or Lenin, and suddenly you’ve got a problem beyond a few, small massacres.
Really, we can only be thankful that as yet that hasn’t happened. The ISIS guy (al-Baghdadi), so far, seems to be the closest to that level, but not close enough thankfully.
+1,000,000
This is why I never make up my mind about what really happened until the dust settles and all the facts are in. The bigger the event, the longer it takes.
Has this attack been linked to Shiite extremists?
This one? It’s too early to know. ISIS is Sunni.
They’ll know more tomorrow.
At present, no. And the likelihood of it being so is more-or-less nil. If it is linked to any sort of religious extremism (which is unfortunately likely), it is almost certain to be religious extremism of the fundamentalist Wahhabi variant - i.e, a very strictly Sunni version of the religion, and the exact sort of ideology that Iran combats vociferously.
This does, of course, not rule out that the perpetrator could be a Sunni Iranian, but to my knowledge even among Iranian exiles, the proportion of Sunnis is extremely low.
Nice is one of the loveliest places I’ve ever been to. The boulevard where this happened is lined with upscale old hotels, restaurants, stores and cafés, and runs right along the beach. Bastille Day crowds in France are very dense, and according to CNN there was a crowd on the boulevard (which was closed to traffic) of over 40,000. The truck plowed through them for over a mile. So far the death toll is 77, with over 100 injured. It sickens me that this kind of thing can happen anywhere, but especially in a place so beautiful.