'PURE CARNAGE'

ATTACK ON YONGE: AT LEAST TEN PEOPLE DIED IN A DEVASTATING ATTACK IN TORONTO WHEN A DRIVER MOWED DOWN PEDESTRIANS.

On Monday afternoon, all of a sudden there was screaming and bodies strewn along a bustling section of Yonge Street in Toronto, and there was something about a white van smashing into people, and there was blood on the sidewalks. It was a sunny day.

It is in that strange netherworld of the interregnum, the half-light of sorrow and outrage and shock, that we reveal things about ourselves, about our fears, our assumptions, our bigotries and our capacity for honesty and humility.

The shape of the thing, the outline of it, was suggested, or at least implied, fairly quickly.

From a CTV News helicopter, a count revealed eight bodies covered in tarps. Global News confirmed that Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance was being briefed in Ottawa. Some sort of alert had gone out to military brass across the country.

It didn’t take long before we heard that 10 people were dead, 15 were horribly injured, and the man identified as the driver of the van, apprehended by an amazingly brave Toronto police officer in the act of an attempted “suicide by cop” was a 25-yearold Seneca college student, Alek Minassian, who was either known to authorities, according to some reports, or not known to police, according to other reports.

But before we knew any of that, this is all we knew: Van Rams Pedestrians.

We are all familiar with that headline by now. We are attuned, acculturated, to what comes next.

Owing to the pattern-seeking that makes us human, we will be reminded of Nice, France, Bastille Day, 2016, when a jihadist drove a cargo truck through a crowd of celebrants and killed 86 of them. Nearly 400 more people were badly hurt.

We might recall that last June, three jihadists in a van smashed into pedestrians on London Bridge and carried on in a rampage through the Borough Market district, stabbing people in the streets and in the pubs before police brought them down. Eight people were killed and 48 were injured.

Or we’ll remember Stockholm, a few months earlier, where a rejected asylum seeker and Islamic State enthusiast hijacked a van and drove it into a crowd, killing five people and severely wounding 14 more.

There have been quite a few terrorist atrocities of this kind in recent years, and so we remember them, because in a strange way, they “make sense.”

We sometimes call these slaughters “senseless” killings, but they’re really not. We “understand” these things, in a way, or we try to, because we comprehend that at least they fall within a particular category of evil.

What confounds us is the genuinely random evil and unambiguously senseless horror that attends to tragedies that fit no particularly comprehensible pattern.

Four years ago, 56-year-old Margo Bronstein drove her car into a crowd of people outside a church in Torrance, Calif., killing four people, including a cherubic six-year-old boy. She was sentenced to three years in prison after a court decided that she was under the influence of drugs.

More recently, Adacia Chambers of Stillwater, Okla., was sentenced to life in prison after driving her car straight into Oklahoma State University’s homecoming parade, killing four people and injuring dozens. These were not acts of terrorism, so we don’t remember them.

This, however, was terrorism: Last June, 48-year-old Darren Osborne, seething with a psychopathic rage about Muslims, drove a van into a group of men who had just left their prayers at a mosque in Finsbury Park, London. One man was killed, and nine were badly injured.

From what we know now about Minassian, who it is necessary to refer to as the “suspect” in Monday’s mass murder, we will mostly distinguish between, say, religious fanaticism, and madness, in his case. But it is something we should not do in all such cases, because there is no effective difference between these states of mind anyway.

All we truly need to know at the moment is that as a country, we should spare a thought for the dead, and close our arms as best we can around the living, the loved ones, grieving in their sorrow.

THERE HAVE BEEN QUITE A FEW TERRORIST ATROCITIES OF THIS KIND IN RECENT YEARS. WHEN I HEARD THE SCREAM I TURNED AND THE GUY WAS 30 FEET AWAY … JUST PISSED ME OFF. IT WAS INDISCRIMINATE. HE WAS HITTING WHOEVER HE COULD HIT. — CARL BERGQUIST, A CONTRACTOR TO THE TTC WHO WAS ON YONGE STREET AS THE VAN APPROACHED

CRAIG ROBERTSON / POSTMEDIA NEWS The scene on Yonge Street on Monday after 10 people were struck and killed and 15 others were injured.