Car ramming attack in China kills 11 and wounds 44.

The attack occurred in Hengyang China. The Guardian/ImagineChina. 

A car ramming attack in China has killed 11 people and wounded 44. The Guardian. The driver of the SUV then jumped out of his vehicle and began attacking more people with a knife and a spade before being subdued by police. The suspect has been identified as a 54 year old Chinese national named Yang Zanyun. He has a lengthy criminal record including drug trafficking and arson and Chinese officials speculate that he was motivated to get revenge on society due to those convictions. No other mention of motive has been released and due to Chinese secrecy on these matters, a motive may not be released. 

My Comment:

I don't think this qualifies as a terrorist attack. Without knowing the motive we can't know for sure but it seems unlikely that this attack was for political reasons. I also don't think any link will be found to any larger terrorist organization. This doesn't read as an Islamist attack, for example. Instead it just seems like a man who was very pissed off with his lot in life and decided to take it out on other people. 

That being said, though I don't think that this attack was in support of any terrorist cause I do think that this case was directly inspired by media coverage of terror attacks using vehicles. I bet the attacker got the idea from the Nice attack or the dozens of copycat attacks that have gotten coverage internationally. 

People now understand that ramming a vehicle at a high rate of speed into a crowd of people is a decent way to kill a large number of people. And once your vehicle is disabled you can run into the crowd and attack them with more traditional weapons. After the Nice attack that combined a ramming attack with some shooting, there have been many copycat attacks, many of which weren't even done in the name of radical Islam, including this one. 

It also, once again, shows the limitation of gun control. Private gun ownership in China is essentially non-existent with only a few hunting clubs being an exception. This means they almost never have mass shootings. But this attack and many other knife attacks like it shows that even without guns there are still plenty of ways to murder large numbers of people. And in this case the suspect was able to kill 11 people, which is more than many mass shootings in the United States. 

I think in this specific example this was a crime problem, not a terrorism problem. This man had been long known to Chinese authorities and had been convicted and imprisoned for many crimes. You have to wonder why they let him out in the first place given how draconian the Chinese criminal justice system is. I am guessing that he is not long for the world though as China still has the death penalty...