Comparing Warning Behaviors Demonstrated by Violent Extremists and Mass Shooters

• In Event: Before the Attack: Theoretical and Empirical work on Terrorism and Hate Crime

Abstract

Counterterrorism policy in the United States has recently expanded to focus on acts of both terrorism and targeted violence. The logic underpinning this expansion is that the preventative strategies for terrorism can be similarly applied to targeted violence. However, there is little empirical evidence to substantiate this overlap. Specifically, limited research has assessed the warning behaviors that signal one’s mobilization to terrorism or targeted violence and investigated whether the warning behaviors that indicate involvement in terrorism and violent extremism are similar or different from those that indicate perpetration of targeted violence. We address this issue by examining warning behaviors in a sample of (n=258) violent extremists and (n=485) mass shooters, drawn from two existing open-source datasets. Latent class analysis is conducted to model the co-occurrence of warning behaviors, and the LTB method of distal outcome prediction is used to determine if violent extremists and mass shooters significantly differ in the warning behaviors they are likely to demonstrate. Conceptually, our findings advance our understanding of violent extremism and targeted violence as separate-but-comparable phenomena. Pragmatically, our findings have implications for counterterrorism practice and speak to the efficacy of combining terrorism and targeted violence prevention efforts.

Authors

• Noah Turner, University of Nebraska Omaha / NCITE

• Emily Greene-Colozzi, University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Brent Klein, University of South Carolina

• Steven Chermak, Michigan State University

• Joshua Freilich, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY