Terrorists and mass shooters: More similar than we thought

Previous theories have conjectured that suicide terrorists (those who carry out politically motivated mass violence intending to die in the process) are not actually suicidal in the psychiatric sense. “Those who planned and perpetrated the acts of 11 September 2001 would not conceptualise the acts as suicide but instead would perceive them as martyrdom, rationally underpinned by a legitimate struggle in a conflict of national and religious dimensions,” wrote Harvey Gordon, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in the Middle East, in 2002. But Adam Lankford, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, recently conducted a comprehensive comparison of 81 suicide terrorists and suicide mass shooters who struck in the United States from 1990 through 2010 and concludes that the role of politically-motivated martyrdom in terrorists may not be as relevant as previously thought.

“For years, the conventional wisdom has been that suicide terrorists are no more suicidal than the average soldier or terrorist who is committed to the cause and willing to risk his or her life to fight for it,” Lankford writes.”These explanations largely reject the relevance of personal problems to the behavior of suicide terrorists, preferring to almost exclusively attribute these attacks to group psychology, organizational dynamics, and/or broader ideological movements.” In fact, Lankford argues, apart from the superficial differences in the crimes they perpetrate, suicide terrorists and mass homicide perpetrators in the United States tend to draw from the same pool of mostly male despondent, enraged, grievance-collecting individuals.