Terrorist attack In New Zealand

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The problem is, as many have said, extremists. A related issue is that who is or is not a "terrorist" is a political question, with different people including or excluding people on all sorts of criteria, including religion and nationality.

The New Zealand killer had a political agenda and his target was unarmed civilians. This makes him a terrorist.
 
pbehn said:
In UK it is reported as definitely not terrorism, absolutely not and could not be even considered terrorism. As soon as the perpetrator was reprted to be from Turkey the whole story was dropped like the hottest of hot potatoes.
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Reported the same in Australia. Reporting policy seems to be if it is a right wing white it is automatically a terrorist attack but if by a middle eastern then not a terrorist attack
 
Torch said:
So many incidents have happened here that could of been prevented(police,FBI,etc knew about it or it slipped thru the cracks). Everyone is quick to blame everything but the criminal himself
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In 2018, the FBI released a report on A Study of the Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States Between 2008 and 2013. The authors selected 63 cases on which records were more complete among the 160 total active shooter cases. The authors restricted their study to verified information in the FBI records; thus, there was much missing mental health information. They reported that 16 of the 40 (40%) on which such information was available had received a psychiatric diagnosis; 44 of the 63 (70%) had "mental health stressors" and/or "mental health concerning behaviors" prior to the attack; and 30 of the 35 (86%) on which such information was available had suicidal ideation or had made suicide attempts prior to the attack.

In 2018, the US Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center released a report on Mass Attacks in Public Spaces—2017. It analyzed 28 such incidents that had taken place in 2017. It reported that 18 (64%) of the attackers "experienced mental health symptoms prior to their attack; 9 (32%) were psychotic and 7 (25%) had been hospitalized for treatment or prescribed psychiatric medication prior to their attacks.

In 2015, Michael F. Stone, PhD, a psychoanalyst in New York, published a study of mass killings. Stone selected 235 mass homicides that occurred in the United States from 1913 to 2015 and were reported in newspapers, magazines, books and websites. FBI statistics indicate there were approximately 1,000 mass killings in the United States between 1900 and 1999, meaning Stone's sample covers less than one quarter of the incidents. Stone apparently selected cases for which sufficient information was available to make a psychiatric assessment.

For his diagnoses, Stone used a narrow definition of mental illness, psychosis. Thus, the mass killers identified as mentally ill by Stone were almost all diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Stone judged each of these individuals to have either "clear-cut psychosis" or "probable mental illness." His list of individuals with "probable mental illness" included many with well-identified diagnoses. Edward Allaway, for example, who killed seven people at California State University, Fullerton, in 1976, has been consistently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and remains hospitalized to this day.

Stone concluded that 52 of the killers – 46 men and 6 women – were mentally ill, representing 23% of all 228 mass killers he studied. However, Stone's study covered the period from 1913 until 2015, which included many years before the deinstitutionalization of mental patients and its effects became prominent. If one looks at the most recent years—from 2000 to 2015—Stone judged 28 of those 88 mass murderers, or 32%, to be mentally ill. Over this period, we see the full effects of the closing of state mental hospitals and reduction of community psychiatric services.

Among the 48 mass killers Stone identified with paranoid personality disorder, a number would be identified by other clinicians with paranoid schizophrenia, which would have increased the finding that 32% of the mass killings were associated with serious mental illness. For example, Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant who killed 13 people and himself in 2009 in Binghamton, New York, was diagnosed by Stone as having a paranoid personality disorder. However, Wong left a suicide note, available on the Internet, which described extensive paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations (the police put "the music into my ear"), well-known symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Similarly, Stone classified George Hennard – who killed 23 people and himself in 1991 in a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas – with paranoid personality disorder but acknowledged Hennard was "at the very border of mental illness." Given Hennard's documented belief that "treacherous female vipers" were trying "to destroy me and my family," many clinicians would find that Hennard had crossed that line.

In 2012, a survey in Mother Jones by Follman and colleagues identified 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012. The survey included only those incidents in which four or more people were killed (not including the shooter) and that were not "related to gang activity or armed robbery." The review also included only those in which guns were used as the weapon and thus excluded individuals such as David Attias, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, who in 2001 drove his car onto a Santa Barbara sidewalk, killing four and injuring nine. (Attias left his car following the attack and announced that he was the "angel of death." Five years previously, he had been hospitalized after trying to kill his sister.)
Although no attempt was made to obtain extensive psychiatric data, the authors reported that "a majority were mentally ill—and many displayed signs of it before setting out to kill." Among the 62 shooters, 36 also killed themselves, and 7 others died in shootouts with the police, suspected of being "suicide by cop.

In 2000, the New York Times published a detailed survey by Fessenden of 100 "rampage killers" who committed mass killings between 1949 and 1999. The survey included all "multiple-victim killings that were not primarily domestic or connected to a robbery or gang." The survey included crimes with "multiple victims, at least one of whom died, and to have occurred substantially at one time." A total of 425 people were reported killed and 510 injured.
The author also reported that of the 100 cases "63 involved people who made threats of violence before the event... In case after case, family members, teachers and mental health professionals missed or dismissed signs of deterioration." For example, James Brady "told psychiatrists he wanted to kill people just days before he went on a rampage in an Atlanta shopping mall in 1990."

The survey additionally reflected "much evidence of mental illness in its subjects. More than half had histories of serious mental health problems and 48 killers had a formal diagnosis, often schizophrenia." Of these 48 offenders, 24 had been prescribed psychiatric drugs, but "14 had stopped taking them."
 
For those wanting to analyse the science of combatting terrorism, the following link is in my opinion useful.

Terrorism

It is very difficult to quantify whether terrorism is on the rise or not. The media would have us believe that we are at the dire edge of destruction from it, but the majority of statistical studies suggest the opposite.

What is concerning to me are the numbers of attacks that are not necessarily intended to make a political statement. The aims of these attacks are simply genocide. There is nothing you, as a member of the target group, can do or say or move to to prevent the attacks on your particular minority. All you can do is die
 
MiTasol said:
Reported the same in Australia. Reporting policy seems to be if it is a right wing white it is automatically a terrorist attack but if by a middle eastern then not a terrorist attack
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It was dropped as soon as it was reported that the first victim was related to the shooter...
 
parsifal said:
It is very difficult to quantify whether terrorism is on the rise or not.
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Michael IMHO it most definitely is and again IMHO because of the instantaneous international coverage that the social media sites provide these animals (apologies to the actual animals of the world). There cannot be any doubt that the New Zealand attack was literally produced and directed for the internet.

Before entering a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the gunman paused to endorse a YouTube star in a video that appeared to capture the shooting.
"Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie," he said.
To an untrained eye, this would have seemed like a bizarre detour. But the people watching the video stream recognized it as something entirely different: a meme.

Like many of the things done before the attack on Friday — like the posting of a 74-page manifesto that named a specific internet figure. The PewDiePie endorsement served two purposes. For followers of the killer's videostream, it was a kind of satirical Easter egg. "Subscribe to PewDiePie," which began as a grass-roots online attempt to keep the popular YouTube entertainer from being dethroned as the site's most-followed account, has morphed into a kind of all-purpose cultural bat-signal for the young and internet-absorbed.

For everyone else, a joke designed to ensnare unsuspecting people and members of the media into taking it too literally. The goal, if there was one, may have been to pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere.
In a tweet early Friday morning, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, said, "I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person."

The details that have emerged about the Christchurch shooting are truly horrifying. But a surprising thing about it is how unmistakably online the violence was, and how aware the shooter on the videostream appears to have been about how his act would be viewed and interpreted by distinct internet subcultures. An internet-native mass shooting, conceived and produced entirely for the extremist segment of the internet.

The attack was teased on Twitter, announced on the online message board 8chan and broadcast live on Facebook. The footage was then replayed endlessly on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, as the platforms scrambled to take down the clips nearly as fast as new copies popped up to replace them. In a statement on Twitter, Facebook said it had "quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video," and was taking down instances of praise or support for the shooting. YouTube said it was "working vigilantly to remove any violent footage" of the attack. Reddit said in a statement that it was taking down "content containing links to the video stream or manifesto."
Even the language used to describe the attack before the fact framed it as an act of internet activism. In a post on 8chan, the shooting was referred to as a "real life effort post." An image was titled "screw your optics," a reference to a line posted by the man accused in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that later became a kind of catchphrase among neo-Nazis. And the manifesto — a wordy mixture of white nationalist boilerplate, fascist declarations and references to obscure internet jokes.

The very design of these internet platforms can create and reinforce extremist beliefs. Their recommendation algorithms often steer users toward edgier content, a loop that results in more time spent on the app, and more advertising revenue for the company. Their hate speech policies are weakly enforced. And their practices for removing graphic videos — like the ones that circulated on social media for hours after the Christchurch shooting, despite the companies' attempts to remove them — are inconsistent at best.

It is also pretty obvious that many recent acts of offline violence bear the internet's imprint. Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people and wounding six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, was a frequent user of Gab, a social media platform beloved by extremists. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with sending explosives to prominent critics of President Trump last year, was immersed in a cesspool of right-wing Facebook and Twitter memes.

People used to conceive of "online extremism" as distinct from the extremism that took form in the physical world. If anything, the racism and bigotry on internet message boards felt a little less dangerous than the prospect of Ku Klux Klan marches or skinhead rallies.

Now, online extremism is just regular extremism on steroids. There is no offline equivalent of the experience of being algorithmically nudged toward a more strident version of your existing beliefs, or having an invisible hand steer you from gaming videos to neo-Nazism. The internet is now the place where the seeds of extremism are planted and watered, where platform incentives guide creators toward the ideological poles, and where people with hateful and violent beliefs can find and feed off one another.
So the pattern continues. People become fluent in the culture of online extremism, they make and consume edgy memes, they cluster and harden. And once in a while, one of them erupts and these internet sites suddenly give these cretins an international platform and notoriety .
 
While a percentage have mental illness, there are also a number with personality disorders.

Some examples I can readily recall would be as follows
  1. Robert Benjamin Smith
    • Date: November 12, 1966
    • Location: Rose-Mar College of Beauty, Mesa AZ
    • Casualties: 7 total, 5 fatal, 4 by gunfire
    • Notes: Killer wanted the fame that other killers such as Richard Speck (tortured, raped, and killed 8 nursing students) and Charles Whitman (injured 48 people, killed 16 at the time, later a 17th victim died in 2001), so he decided he'd carry out a massacre of his own. Smith was diagnosed as psychopathic and sentenced to death; sentence was commuted to life-imprisonment in 1972 due to Supreme Court moratorium on capital-punishment.
  2. Eric Harris
    • Date: April 20, 1999
    • Location: Columbine High School; Columbine CO
    • Casualties: 37 not including assailants, 39 including assailants; 13 fatal, plus two assailants
    • Notes: Eric Harris was a psychopath who conspired to kill upwards of 250 people at Columbine High School along with Dylan Klebold (Klebold was mentally ill, likely a bipolar candidate) via the use of blast-fragmentation pipe and propane-bombs in cafeteria and their vehicles in the parking lot, as well as an incendiary device placed away from the school to draw away emergency services. Bombs failed to explode on time, with killers attempting to set them off by gunfire. Killers then decided to head to library (it had no windows) and proceeded to kill 10 people before both committed suicide. The only positive thing I have to say is a hats off to the company who built the propane tanks: Those things took 9mm rounds and held together, and didn't explode. It probably saved the lives of dozens of students.
Personality disorders, as far as it seems are not classified as mental illness because it makes it easier to justify jailing or executing them rather than hospitalizing them. If Ted Bundy wasn't a candidate for death -- who is?

parsifal said:
It is very difficult to quantify whether terrorism is on the rise or not. The media would have us believe that we are at the dire edge of destruction from it, but the majority of statistical studies suggest the opposite.
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From what I remember reading, it is on the decline. The reason we're made to believe all hell is alway breaking lose is that it can be cynically used.

mikewint said:
There cannot be any doubt that the New Zealand attack was literally produced and directed for the internet.
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Of course, there's clearly no dispute on that.
Their recommendation algorithms often steer users toward edgier content, a loop that results in more time spent on the app
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I honestly don't like such algorithms. I do actually liked the diversity online that you would see in the past. Sure, at times I would find like-minded people for certain issues (civil liberties), but you don't want to just see what you want to (Think of it like a cult: If you spend all your time with the cult, and not spend time outside the cult, eventually you'll fall for your own nonsense. If you want to see a good example of this, look at the USAF ).

My concern with this whole issue is that it's not really about realistic, common-sense policies aimed at avoiding pockets of extremism building up, but instead a policy towards justifying censorship: I'm concerned that we'll turn into China. The EU is already pushing for the GDPR, which will involve real-time censorship.
Gab.ai was a social media platform that didn't censor -- sure there were probably a number of right-wing extremists there, but there were also people who simply didn't want to be censored (a number of people I know joined, and none of us were right-wing extremists)
 
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pbehn said:
In UK various reports said he targeted the woman and that he was on a rape charge, then I think it all became so confused they decided to move on.
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That woman was not involved in the shooting. I think the media was confused indeed.
But he has a long list of criminal activity in his past and was under investigation for rape indeed.
It is still not clear what his motives were. Can still be something personal, but as far as I heard, the police at this moment still assumes it's terrorism.
 
I sometimes wonder if some media and, possibly more critically, law enforcement are leaping to the conclusion that all violent crimes committed by Muslims are terrorist acts.

As an aside, a political scientist I know (he's emeritus, but is consulted by the US State Department) has told me that US law does not recognize the existence of domestic terrorists, so the OK City bomber could not have been a terrorist in the legal sense; neither could the church bombers of the 1960s or the people who murdered people attending church or temple on the 2010s. In other words, if those heavily armed alt-right "protesters" opened fire in Charlotteville while chanting their political slogans, it would not have been an act of terror as far as the US government is concerned.
 
swampyankee said:
US law does not recognize the existence of domestic terrorists,
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Current law in the US defines domestic terrorism as "activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended (a) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (b) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (c) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." International terrorism is defined in similar terms.

The FBI has primary authority to investigate all terrorism, domestic and international. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that the FBI has approximately 1,000 domestic terrorism investigations underway, roughly the same as the number of investigations of international or foreign-inspired terrorist investigations. Domestic terrorism investigations are carried out by prosecutors within the Department of Justice and its United States Attorney's Offices, the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, state and local law enforcement officers and prosecutors throughout America.

Of the 25 jihadists who carried out terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11, 11 were killed during the attack or soon after. Of the remaining 14, six were (or are being) tried in state courts, often on charges of first-degree murder or attempted murder. Seven were indicted on federal charges and one, Nidal Hasan, who shot and killed 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded 31 others at Fort Hood Texas in 2009, was tried in a military court.

A review of the FBI's list of domestic terrorism incidents and preventions from 2002 through 2005, the last year covered in a public report, includes 23 incidents and 9 preventions; 22 of the incidents were carried out by eco-terrorists of the Earth Liberation Front or animal rights extremists associated with the Animal Liberation Front. One was carried out by a white supremacist. Six of the preventions involved white supremacists, violent tax protesters, or anti-federal government extremists, two involved planned attacks on abortion clinics, and one involved an anarchist. (During this same period, there was one jihadist terrorist attack and 13 jihadist plots were uncovered.)

Most jihadist terrorist violence in the United States today is inspired rather than directed by foreign organizations. Domestic terrorism generally involves individuals and gangs operating within an even more amorphous universe.
 
That's part of the problem that NZ now has, apparently our terrorism laws are all focussed on international terrorism, nothing about domestic. So he's likely to get 50 counts of murder, and various firearms charges. Hopefully they're to be served consecutively...
 
vikingBerserker said:
drill down to the root cause of it all.
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That's because the root causes are very difficult, time consuming and expensive to deal with and require much more than just passing a simple law.
Consider some of the basic commonalities among "mass shooters"
Mass shooters invariably exhibit an unbroken series of disappointments, frustrations and letdowns. Typically, these may start as early as grade school or high school, and continue into college, a business or a profession. Typically they have failed at nearly everything they tried to accomplish in life.

Social isolation is probably the number one common denominator among mass shooters. Frequently, these loners are separated from their spouses (or never married, to begin with) and alienated from their families. Thus these mass shooters lack close social support networks. As a result, they do not receive critical feedback, attention or human affection, which might temper their extremist tendencies. Lacking these peers that might encourage a little reality-testing they turn to social media where they finally find a peer group that encourage their dangerous fantasies. These can quickly take hold and become all consuming.

Mass shooters never blame themselves or their actions for their failures. Instead, they hold some group — or society as a whole — as being responsible for their lack of success.
Chris Harper-Mercer, for example, who killed nine people at a community college in Oregon ranted and raged about his hatred of women because he was unable to get a date. Externalization of blame is a common thread among mass killers.

Mass shooters tend to amass arsenals of battlefield-type firearms including assault weapons, high-powered rifles and sniper gear. Psychologists have coined the phrase "precarious manhood" to describe the insecurity these men feel because their efforts seem impotent and ineffective in today's society.
Studies have actually demonstrated that simply handling guns can boost testosterone levels in males. It's reasonable to assume then that mass shooters amass weapons as a way of compensating for their feelings of inadequacy.

Mass shooters invariably exhibit a very high degree of self-centeredness that precludes empathy for other people. Mass shooters lack compassion. They see their victims as mere symbols for something they want to annihilate. That self-centeredness translates into a desire for notoriety at all costs — the desire to be the most famous shooter of all-time and with the internet and social media that fame can quickly become international and it's just a click away
 
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