POLITICAL VIOLENCEPolitically Motivated Terrorist Killings in the US: Answering the Critics
My recent posts about politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States revealed surprising findings. There are a few politically motivated killings. If we examine politically motivated terrorist killings perpetrated by domestic terrorists (thus excluding the 9/11 attacks, which were perpetrated by foreign terrorists), the left-right political distribution of murders skews decisively right, even in recent years, but the numbers are minuscule.
See Nowrasteh’s “Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States,” HSNW, 17 September 2025
My recent posts about politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States revealed surprising findings. There are a few politically motivated killings; Islamist terrorists are still the deadliest, and, most relevant for the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left-right political distribution of murders skews right, even in recent years, but the numbers are minuscule. Those findings and others prompted questions and commentary by politicians, journalists, academics, and social media users, including Elon Musk and Catturd2. Below are the most common questions and criticisms, followed by my responses.
Why did you only count fatalities? Why not injuries, property crimes, incidents, or other variables?
My posts focused on homicides committed by politically motivated terrorist killers, with a secondary focus on perpetrators. Some critics thought I should have included incidents, injuries, arrests, property crimes, or other measures of politically motivated violence. Ultimately, those critics claim that if we widen the measurement of politically motivated terrorism to include noisier metrics, then the results would change. They certainly could change, but murders are the best measure.
Deaths are the best measure of violence because all deaths report the same level of harm. They are discrete and equal, which eases comparison between terrorist attacks. All other measures have extreme variance or are otherwise vague, complicating comparison between attacks.
For instance, injuries range from scratches to amputations. Even if you still wanted to include injuries, they are correlated with the number of murders during the shorter period of 1975–2017, when I have complete data for all terrorists on US soil. Incidents are also a worse variable than the fatalities because some incidents result in more people murdered or injured than others. An incident could be a ding-dong-ditch or blowing up the house, a variance in damage so high that it’s about as useful as describing the Grand Canyon and my local creek as “water holes.” Arrests of plotters before they could attack are also a weak measure because they treat all plotters as equals when there are major differences in competence, seriousness, or potential harm. Killing somebody in an attack is also a decent proxy for the intensity of the killer’s belief.
