San Diego shooting shows disturbing trend of shooters copying acts of violence | San Diego mosque shooting

The killing of three men at a San Diego mosque Monday is the latest example of a disturbing trend in recent decades: Hate-motivated shooters learning from each other — and copying each other — in acts of violence intended to push the nation toward race war and, ultimately, societal collapse.

The two San Diego shooters, ages 17 and 18, killed Amin Abdullah, 51, a security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, Mansour Kaziha, 78, a mosque elder and founding member of the center, and Nadir Awad, 57, who lived across the street and whose wife worked as a teacher at the center’s school.

The shooters later died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The couple appears to have been deeply rooted in online extremist networks and admired the shooters who killed dozens of people at houses of worship, schools and grocery stores across the United States. In a 75-page document written by the shooters before Monday’s attack, they expressed their hatred towards Muslims and Jews, towards black people, the LGBTQ+ community, women and towards both political parties in the United States.

In addition to the document outlining their extremist views, they also livestreamed their violence and wrote in white marker on their guns — common tactics among shooters who have been radicalized online, said Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute to Counter Digital Extremism, which investigated the shooters’ digital footprint to understand a possible motive for the attack.

“Preliminarily, we see two individuals who were jointly radicalized in this digital space and then jointly radicalized in this moment of violence,” Kriner said.

At a press briefing Tuesday, JD Vance, the vice president, called the shooting “reprehensible.”

“The principle of religious violence is particularly repugnant, especially in the United States of America,” he said. “And as a devout Christian, I would say that is one of the most un-Christian and un-American things anyone can do.”

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah in September and the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the president, his administration and their allies said rhetoric from Democrats and the left was a catalyst for political and extremist violence.

Earlier this month, the White House released its counterterrorism strategy, which said the greatest threats of domestic terror and violence come from “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, traditional Islamist terrorists, and left-wing violent extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”

Experts say growing research shows that recent high-profile shootings in the United States are primarily committed by people heavily influenced by online spaces, where traditional political divisions are largely irrelevant.

The counterterrorism strategy also makes no mention of violence from white supremacists or radicalized youth online, even though federal officials have already acknowledged the risks these networks pose.

Over the past year, researchers and the FBI have also warned of a rise in nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), which the federal government describes as violence “motivated by hatred of society and the desire to bring about its collapse through wanton chaos.”

It’s unclear how many high-profile shootings are linked to this specific form of hate. But in February, the FBI said it was investigating at least 350 people across the United States who it says are linked to NVE networks that extort vulnerable young people into acts of terrorism and sexual violence.

Last March, the FBI published an advisory warning against groups that radicalize young people toward violence and hate-motivated use. “threats, blackmail and manipulation” to coerce them to acts of violence against themselves or the public. And in March of this year, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Illinois issued a press release explaining how these groups continued to use “digital platforms to exploit and radicalize children.”

In their manifesto, the San Diego shooters both frequently reference the man who gunned down 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Kriner said this shows that many violent extremists are not tied to conventional political beliefs, but rather adopt the ideology of other shooters before them.

The 23-year-old man who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 was inspired by the two Columbine high school shooters. Nearly a decade later, in 2016, authorities found a book about the Virginia Tech and Columbine shooters in the bedroom of an 18-year-old German man who shot nine people at a Munich shopping mall.

The 18-year-old who fatally shot 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 was inspired by the Christchurch shooter three years earlier, as well as shooters at El Paso, Walmart and a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The shooter who killed two children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last August expressed admiration for the 28-year-old gunman who killed three children and three adults at a Nashville school two years ago.

Kriner said most high-profile extremist shooters were not limited by traditional political binaries such as Democrats or Republicans. Instead, their views are a mixture of fascist ideals and the feeling that the world has fallen into such a state of disrepair that extremely violent measures must be taken.

“The fundamental conviction to do something, to act, appeals across social, racial, economic and national divides,” Kriner said. “It’s hard for us to find the motivator because everything becomes a factor. »