It’s a common feature in the response to the high-profile acts of gun violence in the US: among the first, if not the first, element in a shooter’s background to be scrutinized is their political beliefs.
The recent spate of mass shootings has followed this same playbook. After Charlie Kirk’s shooting, Republican officials, including Donald Trump and JD Vance, were quick to paint the suspect as “a radical leftist”, even when little was known about his background. When a young man opened fire at a Texas Ice facility last week, killing two detainees and injuring another, authorities and the media quickly turned to the question of which political camp the suspected attacker belonged to.
When a man attacked a Mormon church days later, attention swiftly turned to the suspect’s pro-Donald Trump yard signs. A shooter’s race and religion are also often scrutinized, especially when the shooter is not white or Christian.
But leaning so heavily on shooters’ political identity to understand mass violence fails to capture the evolving profile of people who decide to enact mass and targeted violence, said Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for countering digital extremism.
Identifying shooters as either Democrats or Republicans goes against a growing body of research showing that the nation’s most high-profile shootings in recent years have been committed by people who were most influenced by online spaces, where traditional politics is largely irrelevant.
“When we try to distill them into a simple binary of politics, we’re missing the larger picture,” Kriner said. “These actors are not solely motivated by that, and it’s missing the grievance that’s driving this violence that is not ideological, partisan or political.”
He said: “What we find, more often than not, is that the politics of a shooter are less relevant. It’s about the fixation on violence. Individuals can fixate on violence regardless of their racial or political or religious characteristics.”
More and more, high-profile shooters are influenced by other shooters who came before them, and the nihilistic, conspiratorial and extremist beliefs they often subscribe to.
The 23-year-old 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 and killed nine people at a Munich shopping mall.
The 18-year-old who shot and killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo, New York grocery store in 2022 had been inspired by the white supremacist who had killed 51 people across two New Zealand mosques three years prior, as well as the shooter in the hate-fueled mass shootings at an El Paso Walmart and a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Most recently, the gunman who killed two children at the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis in lateAugust admired the 28-year-old shooter who killed three children and three adults at Covenant school in Nashville, Tennessee, who too was inspired by the shooters that came before them.
The digital footprint of these shooters, who left behind online writings on their beliefs, contradictory as they may be, is a clear example of how the internet has changed the way people become radicalized, Kriner said. Instead of meeting a neo-Nazi in their local neighborhood and reading literature, the young suspects of today are seeing prior shooters become memes to be passed around and built upon, he explained.
“There’s a compilation of ideological influences, not a singular focus,” Kriner added. “The internet is changing the way individuals are radicalizing. There are fewer ideological hard barriers and we’re seeing that creep because of memes.”
While experts such as Kriner argue we should de-prioritize the focus on political beliefs in favor of studying how shooters radicalize, that does not mean we should ignore historical indicators of mass violence, such as a fixation on other shooters and serial killers and deep-seated hate toward minorities. But, they should be evaluated alongside a rapidly changing landscape of radicalization, Kriner added.
“We have to acknowledge the historical influences and drivers of violence that are continuing while new influences and drivers will emerge,” he continued. “We can’t presume that one outweighs the other. There is no set profile for a perpetrator of mass violence.”
But this kind of research is now under threat from cuts made by the Trump administration. Department of homeland security programs such as the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships lost about 20% of its staff in early April and the database Terrorism and Targeted Violence was canceled entirely.
Political affiliation is not the only category that should be rethought in trying to understand the drivers of high-profile crimes. Binaries such as Republican, Democrat, gay or straight, are increasingly inadequate when describing contemporary American society and high-profile shooters alike, researchers say.
“We won’t get to a solution if our only question is: were they a Democrat or Republican,” Kriner added.
