• Accused Buffalo Mass Shooter Had Threatened a Shooting While in High School. Could More Have Been Done to Avert the Tragedy?

    There is a $3 billion industry in U.S. school safety focused almost entirely on hardening schools with active shooter drills, metal detectors and armed security. In recent years, however, behavioral threat assessment teams – teams in schools that get troubled people help before they turn to violence – have been touted as key to bridging the gap between hard security and soft prevention.

  • A Quest for Significance Gone Horribly Wrong – How Mass Shooters Pervert a Universal Desire to Make a Difference in the World

    There is a mental and psychological dimension to the problem of mass shooting, to be sure, but it is not illness or pathology. It is the universal human quest for significance and respect – the mother, I believe, of all social motives.

  • California Church Shooting Exposes Little-Known Tension Between Two Groups of Taiwanese

    Americans of Taiwanese descent belong to two distinct groups: Members of the first group come from families which had lived in Taiwan for hundreds of years. Members of the second group descend from families who were part of a wave of people from China who were exiled to Taiwan in the 1940s under the Chinese Nationalist government as the Communists took over mainland China. Members of the first group vehemently oppose China, while members of the second group are more conciliatory toward China and its regional ambitions. The two groups’ historical differences and ongoing tensions became evident on Sunday in a shootout at a Taiwanese Presbyterian church gathering in Southern California.

  • More Mass Shootings Are Happening at Grocery Stores – 13% of Shooters Are Motivated by Racial Hatred, Criminologists Find

    Mass public shootings in which four or more people are killed have become more frequent, and deadly, in the last decade. And the tragedy in Buffalo is the latest in a recent trend of mass public shootings taking place in retail establishments.

  • U.S. Gun Homicides Spiked 35% From 2019 to 2020: CDC Report

    The U.S. firearm homicide rate spiked 35 percent in 2020, the first full year of the coronavirus pandemic, rising to the highest level in almost three decades of record-keeping. The CDC reported 19,350 firearm homicides in the U.S. in 2020, and 24,245 cases of suicide by gun during the same period.

  • News Media Heeding Call to Limit Naming Perpetrators in Mass Shootings

    Is reducing the number of times the perpetrator’s name is used in news coverage in the public interest? It certainly diminishes the notoriety of the perpetrator and reduces any incentive to become famous. Yet when the name is not used, other more relevant details, such as the person’s motives and background, may also not be reported.

  • Co-Offenders Likely to Violently Turn on One Another: Gang Study

    Researchers use over a decade of data from Thames Valley Police to reveal ‘mechanisms’ that generate and sustain violence within networks of organized crime.

  • Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide

    Californians who didn’t own handguns but lived with handgun owners were more than twice as likely to die by homicide compared with those living in gunfree homes.

  • European Neo-Nazi Group Exports Anti-Semitism Across Scandinavia, Beyond

    Sweden’s Nordic Resistance Movement held 185 “combat training” sessions in 2020 and has served as inspiration for American racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists. The Nordic Resistance is Scandinavia’s most dangerous far-right extremist group, actively spreading its hate message abroad.

  • The Military Is Making Progress in Its Counter-Extremism Efforts, but Gaps Remain

    DOD released its report on countering extremist activity in the ranks. Andrew Mines writes that the report is timely, as data from research by different organizations provide multiple metrics that show a relatively small but growing problem of extremism in the military. “Today, the U.S. faces an extremist threat that is increasingly mainstream and harder to counter with traditional prevention tools. The federal government is already undergoing a sea change in its own approach, and the military has shown that it isn’t shying away from the problem either,” he writes.

  • DHS Sued Over Vetting Program to Collect and Data Mine

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) the other day filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records about a multi-million dollar, secretive program that surveils immigrants and other foreign visitors’ speech on social media.

  • Jihadists, Far-Right Extremists Vex Russia–Ukraine War

    Jihadist militants from Chechnya have been helping Russia in its war in Ukraine, but the influx of jihadist militants does not constitute the bulk of foreign fighters who have joined the war. It is feared that the pro-Ukraine ‘International Legion’ is infiltrated by far-right extremist groups who support Ukraine’s own far-right organizations. One expert warns that the war “will almost certainly attract far-right extremists, who have long viewed [Ukraine] as an ideal training ground to gain combat experience for the eventual ‘race wars’ they anticipate waging back home.”

  • Domestic Violent Extremism within DHS

    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas created a working group consisting of senior DHS officials to conducted a comprehensive review of how to best prevent, detect, and respond to potential threats related to domestic violent extremism within the Department of Homeland Security.

  • U.S. Stand Your Ground Laws Associated with 700 Additional Homicides Every Year: Study

    Stand Your Ground laws in the United States have expanded legal protections for individuals who use deadly violence in self-defense. A new study estimates they result in an additional 700 homicides each year - an increase in monthly homicide rates of 11 percent nationally, but up to 28 percent in some states.

  • Which is the Bigger Threat: Offline or Online Radicalization?

    The Global Network on Extremism Technology (GNET) has just released a report which seeks answers to these questions: Are those radicalized offline or online more of a threat? Which group is harder to detect, more successful in completing attacks, and more lethal when they do so? Is the pattern different for youth versus older perpetrators and for men versus women?