Hampstead Heath on a winter’s day. The low sunlight glimmers through bare trees, reflecting off frozen lakes and ponds above the smoky city. The air is filled with the sound of gunfire: pistols, rifles and shotguns going off at such frequent intervals that, according to one eyewitness, it seemed as though ‘there were as many guns abroad as birds’.

I’ve not picked an odd venue to pitch a novel about a Russian invasion. This in fact was the exact scene in December 1818 when, according to romantic poet John Keats, he and some dozens of other men were to be found shooting at birds on the Heath. The poet himself, best known for rhapsodising about a songbird, shot a ‘Tomtit’ – or a blue tit to you and I.

Surprising as it may seem to a modern reader, the sight and sounds of dozens – perhaps hundreds – of armed men in what is now one of London’s biggest parks was hardly remarkable, except as a grand day out. The reason for this is that it had simply never occurred to anyone to use a gun as a weapon of mass murder. It was not until the pistols act of 1903 that the sale of guns (as opposed to the possession of such) was specifically restricted.

Similarly, people had been driving cars for decades with hardly anyone intentionally driving them into crowds, bar one or two isolated incidents. In recent years, though, the weaponisation of cars has become a depressingly regular occurrence. In 2025 alone, Germany has experienced two such attacks. The US, which normally makes headlines for gun murders, has seen five separate incidents of cars being deliberately driven into crowds. In the UK, two pedestrians were injured in a deliberate ramming in Luton, following several other attacks over the last few years in Birmingham, Soho and Westminster. So frequent have vehicular rammings become that I’d argue they’re almost normalised. Note how quickly the Vancouver attack, which killed eleven, dropped out of the headlines. A similar attack the same month in Ontario barely made the international news.

Of course, cyclists don’t need reminding that cars are potentially lethal, even when driven responsibly. But just as with guns, there’s simply no way to put this genie back in the bottle; even if it were desirable to return to the days of casually shooting wildlife in London parks, it’s simply impossible. Similarly, now that people know that cars can be used this way, there will always be some violent, disturbed individuals who choose to do just that.

But we should not accept this as simply a fact of life in the same way we accept other forms of car harm. Rather, we should copy the approach we’ve taken to firearms. The use of guns as weapons of mass murder led us to heavily restrict licences and to ban certain types of gun, such as handguns and automatics, entirely. There’s no reason we shouldn’t take the same approach to cars now they’re being used in the same way.

Just as people with criminal records rightly find it more difficult to acquire a gun licence, judges should be given the option of revoking the driving licences of people with a history of violence, and those convicted of being members terrorist groups. While it’s probably impossible to entirely stop this type of attack taking place, the consequences could be mitigated if car manufacturers were required to adopt safety features, such as height limits for bonnets as well as speed restrictions and weight limits. Simple physics deems that an SUV driven at 80mph is many times more destructive than a micro car driven at 55. Meanwhile, urban planners should consider the possibility that cars can be used in this way as part of overall plans to shift away from car dependency.

For too long, governments have been slow to mitigate car harm, too beholden to a false idea of the median voter as an unreconstructed petrolhead. The use of cars as murder weapons should be a wake-up call.