,
11 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
1. To generalize a bit here, but in a way that I think is helpful in understanding how mass shootings (& similar mass attacks) are similar but different, there tend to be 3 types of these attacks.
2. The first type is where the shooter returns to his workplace, school, ex-girlfriend, etc. While the violence is hugely disproportionate & the shooter may have imbibed political radicalization, these are *personal*. The shooter blames his community for his miseries.
3. Most of the shooters in this category seem obvious in retrospect, & are the most promising for interventions: red flag behavior, prevent them from getting armed, route them towards treatment, etc.
4. The second & polar opposite type is the clearly political shooting (Charleston, most Islamist attacks). Again, these may be unwell people, but the *target* is chosen with some sense of political relevance. The keys are hate & a desire to sow fear that tracks the target.
5. These are the kind of attacks that have the best chance of being stopped through traditional anti-terror tools: observing online radicalization, looking for vectors to groups, etc. These guys can & will get weapons. You focus on stopping the man.
6. What we're dealing with increasingly is a third category: the *random* shooting, where the target has nothing to do with either the shooter personally or the shooter's political goals. True, political terrorism can pick targets of opportunity. But this is more nihilistic.
7. This is hard stuff for law enforcement, a kind of gray area between political radicalization & mental illness, but with a predictable relationship with neither. It's mad-at-the-world & publicity-seeking, but the absence of political goals or personal beefs is devilish.
8. The Islamists remain a larger, longer-running global threat, with more resources & capabilities. But at least there's enough method to their madness to give investigators a place to start looking.
9. The political vector of white supremacists, we can track. But a fair number of the homegrown guys are only tangentially connected to any particular source of radicalization, much less organization. They have no remotely coherent program to obtain power.
10. The single biggest thing we can do to stop this, third type of shooting is the hardest thing for our media & culture to do: stop bathing in the publicity of these outrages, which are imitated. The publicity is the only real goal these guys have.
11. Basically, yes. The good news is that the third type feels like a fad that will burn itself out in time. The bad news is, history is full of fads with horrendous body counts. And the more nihilistic types are less likely than the first two to leave a lot of advance clues.
