www.cna.org |
Despite the focus on suicide terrorism over the past 20
years—particularly by media outlets, policy-makers, and
academics—scholarship regarding suicidality in domestic
terrorism remains sparse. The post-9/11 research related
to suicidality in terrorism has largely focused on the
suicide terrorism of Islamist extremists.
1
The research that
touches on domestic terrorism, however, is both limited
and inconclusive. Lankford, for example, has argued that
suicidality is one of three key
similarities between perpetrators
of suicide terrorism and
perpetrators of mass shootings.
2
But a 2017 article by Freilich et al.,
whose research focused on far-
right and jihadi attacks in the US,
found that suicide attackers were
no more likely than non-suicide
attackers to have previously
attempted suicide.
3
By contrast, suicidality among
those who carry out public
shootings is well documented.
Jillian Peterson and James
Densley, leveraging The Violence
Prevention Project’s (TVPP’s) Mass Shooter Database,
found that 70 percent of the 197 individuals who
committed mass shootings over the past 60 years either
had a history of suicidality or intended to die carrying
out their attack.
4
Retrospective research by the US Secret
Service on school shooters from 1974 to 2000 found that
at least 78 percent had experienced suicidal thoughts or
engaged in suicidal behavior before their attack.
5
And an
analysis leveraging the Columbia Mass Murder Database
found that nearly half of all mass shooters died by suicide at
the scene of their attack.
6
Mass shootings, as Peterson and
Densley have noted, may in fact be “crimes of despair.”
7
SUICIDALITY AMONG DOMESTIC TERRORISTS
Megan K. McBride, Kaia Haney, Michelle Strayer, and Jessica Stern
We leveraged a new dataset—the Domestic Terrorism
Oender Level Database (DTOLD)—to explore whether
domestic terrorism attacks may also be crimes of despair.
The database captures publicly available information (e.g.,
media reporting, court records) on the life histories of
320 individuals who carried out a non-Islamist terrorist
attack in the United States between January 1, 2001, and
December 31, 2020.
Our data suggest that domestic
terrorists in general may be
more suicidal than the general
population but signicantly less
suicidal than mass shooters except
when domestic terrorists kill four
or more people (notably, four is
the number of deaths required for
a shooting to meet the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s denition
of a mass shooting).
DTOLD contains three variables
relevant to the question of
suicidality: history of suicidality
(including suicide attempts and
suicidal ideation), intention to die while committing a
terrorist attack, and death by suicide during or immediately
after a terrorist attack.
Collecting data on suicidality is dicult, but 19.3 percent
(62) of the individuals in DTOLD have been coded positively
for at least one of the three indicators of suicidality. This rate
is notably higher than the rate calculated by the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which
is 4.37 percent for men (89 percent of those in DTOLD are
men). This rate is still lower, however, than TVPP’s rate of 70
percent among mass shooters.
Collecting data on
suicidality is dicult, but
19.3 percent (62) of the
individuals in DTOLD have
been coded positively for
at least one of the three
indicators of suicidality.
Unlimited distribution.
This project was supported by Award No. 2021-GG-02723, a grant from the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.
Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors,
and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.
