Comments Elsewhere

“That goes beyond eccentric and I’m aware of no defensive uses to which one can put car bombs.”

That’s easy.

Suppose the aggressor against whom you intend to defend yourself is a large, well-organized gang and tends to segregate itself into distinct residential compounds. Then driving a car bomb into one of their compounds and blowing it up would be an effective way of killing aggressors and destroying their material means of attacking you. That would in fact be a considerably more precise form of defense with less risk of killing innocents than the conventional way of throwing high explosives around, i.e. dropping them on urban centers from airplanes at high altitudes.

Of course, I know nothing in particular about this cult or its intentions, so take this as a purely hypothetical point.