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Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022 [1]

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Date: 2023-07

Extremist Mass Killings: A Closer Look

The shooting sprees in Buffalo and Colorado Springs, as well as the attempted mass shooting in Portland, highlight one of the largest threats that extremists pose to public safety today: mass killing incidents. The number of such incidents related to extremists has skyrocketed in recent years and there is no reason to think this will change soon.

There is no consensus as to what constitutes a “mass killing;” different studies and reports use different standards. One of the most common measures defines mass killings as events that leave four or more people dead. This is the standard COE has used in the past. However, by itself, such a measurement understates the full threat of mass killings posed by extremists, because there have been a number of incidents in which extremists intended to kill many people but succeeded in killing fewer than four. In 2019, for example, white supremacist John Earnest opened fire inside a synagogue in Poway, California, attempting a mass killing of Jews attending services there. He killed one person and wounded several others, but then his firearm jammed, and he fled. In other words, some violent episodes would have been mass killings if not for luck or other circumstances, such as the timely intervention of law enforcement. Thus attempted mass killings are also important to acknowledge. 14

How many extremist-related mass killings and lethal attempted mass killings have taken place in the U.S.? Center on Extremism data on extremist-related murders have identified a minimum of 62 such incidents from the 1970s to the present day. However, 16 of those 62 events either were not ideological in nature, or the motive for them could not be determined. These included school shootings, domestic violence shootings and workplace shootings conducted by extremists but not necessarily because of their extremist ideology. Although we note those incidents here, we do not further analyze them or include them in the statistics below.

The 46 remaining incidents, however, represent direct ideological attacks that resulted in mass deaths (31) or were lethal incidents that were intended to cause mass deaths (15). Such attacks have killed at least 420 people between 1971 and 2022.

There are three other types of incidents related to extremist mass killings that are not tabulated or analyzed in this study. First, there have been some incidents in which people may have attempted a mass killing but failed to cause fatalities. For example, in an act of left-wing political violence, James Hodgkinson opened fire in 2017 at a group of Republican members of Congress practicing in Arlington, Virginia, for the yearly congressional baseball game. The shooter wounded several people in the attack, but none fatally. Similarly, in 2020, a self-described “incel,” Armando Hernandez, shot at couples at a Phoenix-area mall, angry that women had rejected him. He injured several people, but they all survived. Because this report focuses on extremist-related murders and because COE does not necessarily have comprehensive data on all shootings by all types of extremists over this time span, these incidents are not included in the statistics here, but their existence further emphasizes the serious threat posed by extremist mass killings.15

Second, extremists have sometimes plotted mass killings, or at least considered mass killings as an option among various possible types of terrorist attacks, only to be detained by law enforcement before carrying out such plans. For example, in 2022, FBI agents arrested two men in Warsaw, Missouri, on charges related to an alleged plot to travel to the Texas border to shoot migrants crossing the border. Numerous people might have been killed had the pair been able to carry out their purported plans, but they were not given the opportunity. Such incidents are not included in these tabulations because they did not result in any deaths and because it is not always possible to gauge whether such an attack would actually have taken place. Again, the existence of such plots underlines the overall danger of extremist mass killings.16

Finally, there are numerous incidents where extremists have opened fire on law enforcement officers trying to arrest them, to serve a search warrant or engaging in a similar activity. Some of these violent responses have resulted in significant injuries and deaths among law enforcement. However, such reactive incidents are not included here; rather, the focus is on extremists seeking to commit a mass killing.

When one looks at the historical data, the recent surge of extremist-related mass killings is immediately obvious. From the 1970s through the 2000s, extremist mass killing incidents consistently occurred at a relatively low level—from two to seven incidents a decade (although, it should be noted that, because of the difficulty in determining which left-wing extremist bomb attacks in the 1970s and 1980s were intended to cause mass casualties—many were actually aimed at property and warnings were telephoned to targets beforehand—it is possible that the number of such incidents may be undercounted here).



However, in the 2010s the number of mass killing incidents rose precipitously to 21, at least three times the total from any previous decade. In 2021 and 2022 there have already been five incidents, as many as there were during the whole decade of 2001-2010. The 26 mass killing incidents over the past 12 years actually exceed those from the previous 40 years (20). It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings.

Just as the number of incidents has increased, so too has the number of deaths. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in ideological extremist-related mass killing incidents, far more than in any other decade other than the 1990s—almost all the deaths during which were caused by a single horrific incident, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The past two years, 2021 and 2022, have added 22 more casualties to the deadly toll.



What has this recent surge of mass killings looked like? From 2011 through 2022, a period of 12 years, there were 26 ideological domestic extremist-related mass killing incidents (18 actual mass killings and 8 lethal attempted mass killings). These attacks resulted in 186 deaths—and many others wounded or injured (the latter often as they attempted to flee the scene of a mass killing).

Overwhelmingly, these recent mass killing events were also mass shooting events. Firearms were the primary weapon of choice in 23 of the 26 incidents; the only exceptions were the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 and the vehicular attacks conducted in 2017 by white supremacist James Fields, Jr., in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Islamist extremist Sayfullo Saipov in New York City. Of the 186 deaths, 174 of them (including one of the people killed by the Boston Marathon bombers) were by firearms. Firearms are by far the weapon of choice for domestic terrorists in the U.S. seeking to kill.

During the past 12 years, right-wing extremists, domestic Islamist extremists and left-wing extremists have all conducted or attempted mass killing incidents. Right-wing extremists, of different stripes, have launched the most attacks, totaling 16 of the 26 incidents (61.5%) and 89 of the 186 deaths (47.8%). The majority of the attacks by right-wing extremists (10 out of 16) were committed by white supremacists, typically targeting minorities. They killed 71 people. Anti-government extremists, anti-abortion extremists, toxic masculinity extremists and other right-wing extremists also engaged in mass killing incidents.

Domestic Islamist extremists engaged in six mass killing incidents (23%), resulting in 81 deaths (43.5%), including the single most lethal incident, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, which killed 49 people. Left-wing extremists—all Black nationalist extremists—launched three attacks (11.5%) that killed 12 people (6%). Finally, categorized as “other extremism” in these tabulations, is the 2019 Jersey City, New Jersey, shooting spree by Black Hebrew Israelites David Anderson and Francine Graham, which primarily targeted a Jewish kosher market. They killed four people.



Some of the reasons for the alarming increase in extremist mass killings are clear. Attacks by right-wing extremists were driven primarily by white supremacist attacks against racial and religious minorities, many motivated by the rise of white supremacist accelerationism, a belief among some white supremacists that they must use violence to hasten the collapse of modern society so that they can build a new white supremacist civilization from its ashes. Whereas other white supremacists may or may not support violence, or only in certain circumstances or against certain targets, accelerationist white supremacists actively promote extreme violence and celebrate killers such as Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, Brenton Tarrant and Patrick Crusius, among others, hoping to inspire more such perpetrators of mass killings.17

Domestic Islamist extremist attacks occurred primarily because of the rise of the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria and its repeated calls to sympathizers around the world to conduct attacks in their own regions. With the decline of ISIS in recent years, such attacks have decreased, although the threat has not disappeared. On December 31, 2022, for example, Trevor Thomas Bickford allegedly attacked three police officers working in Times Square in New York with a knife. According to law enforcement, Bickford’s attack was motivated by Islamist extremist ideology. 18

The three Black nationalist incidents—two of them targeting police—all occurred in 2016-2017 in the wake of controversial high-profile police shootings of people of color. Because killings of people of color by police that are wrongful or widely perceived to be wrongful still regularly occur, future such incidents might spark additional “retaliatory” attacks.

For the near to medium future, the main threat of extremist-related mass killings seems to be white supremacist shooters attacking targets such as people of color, Jews and Muslims and the LGBTQ+ community.

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[1] Url: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2022

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