![]() since 1990, has said trying to draw a single personality profile of a lone wolf attacker is as clunky as trying to draw a profile of a generic criminal: “What interests arsonists and influences them is very different than sexual offenders is very different than burglars,” he said in a 2015 lecture. Similarly, researcher Paul Gill of University College of London, who compiled a database of more than 100 lone wolf attacks in Europe and the U.S. since 1940 - though that figure includes about 30 cases that were FBI stings, hoaxes or plots that were foiled before they could be pulled off. They’ve identified 124 lone wolf attackers in the U.S. He, along with Ramon Spaaij, a sociologist at Victoria University, built one of the DOJ-funded databases and will be publishing the data in the forthcoming book, The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism: A New History. “We may want to put these guys into a neat little box and wrap a ribbon around it, but that is not reality,” said Mark Hamm, a criminologist at Indiana State University. In an effort to better understand the phenomenon, the Department of Justice has funded two groups of researchers to compile databases of historic lone wolf attacks, so they can be analyzed for trends, psychological profiles - and, the authorities hope, insight into how to prevent them.īoth sets of researchers say it’s dangerous to try to make sweeping generalizations about lone wolves. Researchers believe lone wolf attackers are fundamentally different than people who participate in organized political violence. By 2010, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta declared that lone wolf attacks could pose “the main threat to this country.” The next year, President Barack Obama laid out the problem on CNN: “When you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators.” But they began attracting special attention from the national security community more than a decade ago when Al Qaeda started encouraging them. Lone wolf attacks are rare - there have been perhaps 100 successful politically motivated attacks pulled off by a solo actor in the United States since the 1940s. And law enforcement officials have not identified any accomplices, indicating that both men plotted the attack on their own, without direction from or coordination with others. In both cases, people around them had worried about their mental health. Both drew some of their radicalization online. By contrast, Micah Johnson, who fatally shot five police officers in Dallas last week, was an African-American Army vet, apparently enraged by the police killings of black men.īut despite their unique circumstances and motivations, both massacres bear the hallmarks of “lone wolf attacks.” Both Mateen and Johnson appear to have been motivated by a mixture of political and personal grievance. On the surface, the two shooting rampages appear quite different: Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando, was the son of Afghan immigrants, reportedly consumed by homophobia and inspired by ISIS.
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