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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |