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I was a couple blocks from the scene in an office. There were cops on every block even before the incident so we can be sure they tried immediately to stop the vehicle. A key point is that the main barriers at Bourbon and Canal are normally just sawhorses. The bollards on the side just served to narrow traffic. I didn’t see the extra barriers at issue tonight but apparently there were some.

e: national news is reporting no steel barricades

Huh?

> Mayor LaToya Cantrell described the incident as a "terrorist attack" but FBI special agent Alethea Duncan later said it is "not a terrorist event", instead saying there have been "improvised explosive devices" found in the area.

Running over people and having improvised explosive devices is not a terrorist event?

It's a political decision how to classify crimes these days. I think government agencies want to avoid exciting the public, inadvertently creating animosity against groups of similarly identified people, but this obfuscation erodes public trust. The government, and the media reporting, should be much more transparent about these incidents, regardless of the participants.
> It's a political decision how to classify crimes these days.

The classic example is Nidal Hassan, whom Obama never described as a terrorist. The Department of Defense formally classified the Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence"!

> It's a political decision how to classify crimes these days.

A number of crimes are by their very nature political—terrorism, assassinations, etc.

NBC news says the truck used reportedly had an black flag mounted on the back, probably one reason for the relatively quick terrorism labeling. edit, they mentioned it being “ISIS style” but pics they’re showing aren’t very clear and are walking the claim back.
(grammar nazi mode on) Terrorists usually have a goal (whether good or bad), to extort something from the terrorized person/group. A non-terrorist does does things without expecting much from the victims.
Shouldn't that be "vocabulary nazi mode"? :p
"Terrorist" is a political designation, and does not have such a clear definition.

Dylann Roof and Anderson Lee Aldrich were not charged with terrorism. Luigi Mangione was. How does your grammar National Socialist mode distinguish between them?

What I wrote is the general understanding of the word, whether you agree with it or not. On who and how it is applied, that's a totally different thing - that is a political designation, if you ask me (especially when it comes to domestic affairs).

Though I'd like to believe that in this case, at least early on in the investigation, the feds have contradicted the mayor only to make this distinction before they can say it without guessing - once you call someone a terrorist in an official communication, it's hard to take it back.

Except there isn't a good general understanding. Quoting [3] from Wikipedia's entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism :

> "The ordinary current use of the word terrorism is much too wide. That is to say, if we list all the different phenomena which are at one time or another described as terrorism in ordinary conversation, or in ordinary newspapers, or by ordinary politicians, we will end up with a huge rag-bag of not very similar items . . The disadvantages of trying to construct an ordinary-language definition based on current usage can be seen, too, in the plethora of conflicting definitions occurring in philosophical and political literature. Thus philosophers for instance disagree about whether or not terrorism is wrong by definition or wrong just as a matter of fact; they disagree about whether terrorism should be defined in terms of its aims, or its methods, or both, or neither; they disagree about whether or not states can perpetrate terrorism; they even disagree about the importance or otherwise of terror for a definition of terrorism."

If you're going to be pick at nits, you need to be aware of the nits.

Violence used to extort money from a person/group of people is not generally considered terrorism, but your definition says it would be.

Violence against combatants is not generally considered terrorism, but your definition says it would be.

Nope, it's you only. Nobody else thinks that - it is very important how a language is used in real life, and the intention and actual meaning behind its usage.

Have a sleep, and read your response once again tomorrow - if you don't find it ridiculous, flaming for the 3rd definition of the word just for the sake of a pointless "akchyually" comment, then I give you victory, hands down. Otherwise, just have a laugh, and carry on with your life. I will do carry on myself after posting this.

Offtopic: in a previous life as a CSR, decades ago, a customer at work was complaining to us about someone (from very east EU, maybe even Russia? definitely not native speaker) using the word "bro" in a casual, but innocent sentence, and he felt so extremely insulted, he went on literally for hours, demanding the person to be reprimanded... and we had no idea what he was talking about, until we found it on the 11th page of Urban Dictionary that "bro" has a 285th meaning in some random village, which is pejorative under some circumstances - and that's what he was complaining about.

It just came to my mind, don't mind it.

Happy new year!

I literally quoted someone else who said it, with a quote found on the Wikipedia page entry for the topic, linking to the paper at https://www.jstor.org/stable/3751606?seq=1 which goes into details.

A Wikipeda entry which starts, by the way, with: "Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims." showing that combatants and monetary aims are outside at least its broadest definition.

Someone claiming to be in "grammar nazi mode" should be wary of claiming something else is 'pointless "akchyually".'

I guess it was one of the new self driving vehicles. It is not as if someone drove that vehicle into the crowd.
This is a huge problem with how automobile incidents are reported. "Vehicle hits crowd" is bizarre, considering we don't write "Man injured in knife-related collision" or "bullet strikes CEO".

This was a very intentional campaign on the part of car companies to normalize their products about a century ago, and it worked.

Sucks that you're getting downvoted - it's an interesting point that the headline appears to blame an inanimate object

Does seem like a trend too - not sure it can be attributed to headline brevity

It was a "truck-involved collision"
He opened fire though.
So it was a military drone /s

The media always report those kinds of terrorist act way too passively.