In memory of the victims of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, and recent gun violence victims in Atlanta, Georgia, read an excerpt from From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter by Seamus McGraw, out April 2021.
Chapter 4
“'Tis Not Alone My Inky Cloak”
And he knew it.
You could tell that by the easy way his right hand—in those fingerless gloves that are so often a part of the costume—skimmed around the edge of the steering wheel of his aging, car-lot Subaru. There was no tension in his hand as he drove, confidently, but carefully, down the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand. He didn’t speed. He obeyed every traffic signal. Wouldn’t want a ticket. He even pulled over for a moment—as any responsible motorist would—before turning his camera around to take a selfie. He struck a pose, mixing just the right measures of Mad Max menace and faux military bearing, as if he’d practiced it in the mirror. It’s just the sort of thing that a narcissistic, unemployed, friendless gym rat would do, second nature for someone who spent hours almost every day obsessively humping four-hundred-pound weights to flog his body into something more than it really was. And then, taking care to signal, he eased back into the light Friday afternoon traffic.
He had been humming along to the cheery strains of an up-tempo folk song from Serbia, first recorded in 1993. It’s not at all clear that he understood a word of the language, but he certainly understood the gist of the song. It was a sickly sweet tribute to Serbian strongman and convicted war criminal Radova Karadzic, a paean to ethnic cleansing and genocidal mass murder accompanied by the merry trilling of a concertina. “Beware the Ustasha and the Turk,” the song goes.
He wouldn’t be the first to appropriate the mien of the ultranationalist Serbs to cloak his murderous urges.
Some five years earlier, a scrawny young man from Pennsylvania had proudly posed for a picture sporting the combat uniform of the Drina Wolves, a unit of the Serbian Army that massacred 7,500 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.1 Not long after the photo was taken, that imaginary soldier skulked into the woods across the road from a remote state police substation and under cover of darkness opened fire, gunning down two troopers at shift change, killing one and critically wounding the other. Neither one of them was an Ustasha or a Turk. And three years before that, a thirty-two-year-old Internet troll had also wrapped himself in the bloody flag of Serb nationalism, and he still fancied himself some kind of “knight” when he was convicted of murdering seventy-seven people—most of them children, and most of them looking much like him—in a bombing and a sneak attack on an island camp in Norway. In a pretentious, rambling, self-referential 1,500-page manifesto, that killer uses the word “Serb” 341 times. It was eclipsed only by his use of the words “America” or the “United States”—in case there’s any question about his other source of inspiration—which appear in one form or another 726 times, by my own counting.
That killer in Norway had become a hero to the young man in Christchurch. He would even claim he had spoken to that killer. And before he climbed into his rattletrap Subaru that afternoon, the aspiring killer in Christchurch had mailed his own seventy-four-page imitation of that manifesto to, among others, the prime minister of New Zealand. It was shot through with sarcasm and adolescent asides. It railed against indolent immigrants from elsewhere, though the aspiring killer in the Subaru was himself an immigrant from Australia who’d quit his job back home as a personal trainer and squandered the small inheritance his father left him after his suicide on a jaunt through Eastern Europe, among other places. In his imitation screed he tries to figuratively dress himself in the grandiose armor of mythic characters of the ancient past, leaders who fought against invaders from Turkey hundreds of years ago and whose exploits have been exploited ever since by tiny men to justify great atrocities against Muslims in that corner of Europe, in places like Srebrenica. It doesn’t fit this killer well. It doesn’t fit any of them well. They all look small and ridiculous.
The song was over by the time he eased his hatchback into the parking lot of the Al Noor Mosque. Now his tinny speakers struggled to hold a bravely chipper martial air more fitting to his Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry: a fife-and-drum song, “The British Grenadiers,” a toy soldier of a tune that conjures gauzy images of lost empires for those who indulge themselves in such nostalgic fantasies.
The lot was crowded, but he quickly found a space, and of course, even though the spot was perfectly flat, he remembered to engage the emergency brake.
One can’t be too careful.
There was no urgency, no sense of alarm as he casually wrapped his hand around the receiver of a black semiautomatic rifle he had kept on the passenger seat in plain view. It was one of those weapons that Adam Lankford tells us are so often fetishized by these killers, engineered to kill efficiently and designed and marketed to appeal to some soldier-of-fortune fantasy.
Of course it was.
The killer had decorated it, if you can call it that, with white supremacist symbols and the dates of great battles between the West and Islam more than half a millennium ago. In sloppy white paint he had scrawled the names of those ancient generals in that fight, along with the name of a more recent victim of a terrorist attack in Stockholm. It was as if he was shamelessly pilfering her pain and pirating their exploits for his own self-aggrandizement.
He eased out of the driver’s seat and ambled to the back of the car. With his free hand he opened the hatch to expose, again in plain sight, two crudely fashioned improvised explosive devices, another semiautomatic rifle (similar in many respects to the one already in his hand), and a shotgun, also black and also covered with slogans scrawled in a childish hand in white paint. He chose the shotgun and sauntered off at a steady, but not in any way frantic, pace toward the front door of the mosque.
He didn’t even bother to close the hatchback.
He didn’t need to.
He had nothing to fear. And he knew it.
What followed over the next six minutes and thirty-nine seconds was a wholesale atrocity as horrible as any ever committed, anywhere; as vicious as the mass murder of children at West Nickel Mines and Sandy Hook, as murderously theatrical as the massacre of theater goers in Aurora, Colorado, by a killer who had adopted the visage of a cartoon villain.
We know every heartbeat of this part of the mass murder because in an act of supreme narcissism, the kind of narcissism at the heart of many mass shooters, the killer had live-streamed every second of it from the moment he first climbed into his Subaru.
The killing began when he was greeted at the door by a young worshipper who apparently didn’t recognize the menace in the costume the intruder was wearing—the black tunic, the off-the-rack tactical vest—or who didn’t see the garishly decorated killing machines in his hands, one of them fitted with a strobe light to blind and disorient the worshippers.
The young man welcomed the stranger, calling him “brother.”
The killer murdered him where he stood.
It ended—or this part of the attack did, anyway—minutes later as he sauntered back to his car, past a young woman who, wounded, made it as far as the street. “Help me!” she cried as she lay facedown in the gutter. “Help me!” He stepped to the curb and fatally shot her. In the back.
In between, while firing at up to three rounds per second, he killed forty-two innocent, unarmed people, most of them as they huddled together in corners of the mosque.
At one point during the attack, a young man, a head shorter and a stone lighter than the killer, jostled him. Perhaps, as the young man’s family later said, he was indeed making a heroic attempt to grab the murderer’s gun. Or maybe it was an accident. The video evidence is unclear. In any case, the young man bumped into him with no more force than might be expended by a retiree who elbows you while reaching for the second-to-last Christmas turkey in the frozen food section of Pak’nSave. It is clear that the killer was certain that he had nothing to fear.
The killer shot the young man from an arm’s length away. The young man died soon afterward. For the remaining minutes he spent inside the mosque, the killer faced no other resistance, and he seemed to revel in that, to bask in it.
That killer in Norway had become a hero to the young man in Christchurch. He would even claim he had spoken to that killer. And before he climbed into his rattletrap Subaru that afternoon, the aspiring killer in Christchurch had mailed his own seventy-four-page imitation of that manifesto to, among others, the prime minister of New Zealand. It was shot through with sarcasm and adolescent asides. It railed against indolent immigrants from elsewhere, though the aspiring killer in the Subaru was himself an immigrant from Australia who’d quit his job back home as a personal trainer and squandered the small inheritance his father left him after his suicide on a jaunt through Eastern Europe, among other places. In his imitation screed he tries to figuratively dress himself in the grandiose armor of mythic characters of the ancient past, leaders who fought against invaders from Turkey hundreds of years ago and whose exploits have been exploited ever since by tiny men to justify great atrocities against Muslims in that corner of Europe, in places like Srebrenica. It doesn’t fit this killer well. It doesn’t fit any of them well. They all look small and ridiculous.
The song was over by the time he eased his hatchback into the parking lot of the Al Noor Mosque. Now his tinny speakers struggled to hold a bravely chipper martial air more fitting to his Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry: a fife-and-drum song, “The British Grenadiers,” a toy soldier of a tune that conjures gauzy images of lost empires for those who indulge themselves in such nostalgic fantasies.
The lot was crowded, but he quickly found a space, and of course, even though the spot was perfectly flat, he remembered to engage the emergency brake.
One can’t be too careful.
There was no urgency, no sense of alarm as he casually wrapped his hand around the receiver of a black semiautomatic rifle he had kept on the passenger seat in plain view. It was one of those weapons that Adam Lankford tells us are so often fetishized by these killers, engineered to kill efficiently and designed and marketed to appeal to some soldier-of-fortune fantasy.
Of course it was.
The killer had decorated it, if you can call it that, with white supremacist symbols and the dates of great battles between the West and Islam more than half a millennium ago. In sloppy white paint he had scrawled the names of those ancient generals in that fight, along with the name of a more recent victim of a terrorist attack in Stockholm. It was as if he was shamelessly pilfering her pain and pirating their exploits for his own self-aggrandizement.
He eased out of the driver’s seat and ambled to the back of the car. With his free hand he opened the hatch to expose, again in plain sight, two crudely fashioned improvised explosive devices, another semiautomatic rifle (similar in many respects to the one already in his hand), and a shotgun, also black and also covered with slogans scrawled in a childish hand in white paint. He chose the shotgun and sauntered off at a steady, but not in any way frantic, pace toward the front door of the mosque.
He didn’t even bother to close the hatchback.
He didn’t need to.
He had nothing to fear. And he knew it.
What followed over the next six minutes and thirty-nine seconds was a wholesale atrocity as horrible as any ever committed, anywhere; as vicious as the mass murder of children at West Nickel Mines and Sandy Hook, as murderously theatrical as the massacre of theater goers in Aurora, Colorado, by a killer who had adopted the visage of a cartoon villain.
We know every heartbeat of this part of the mass murder because in an act of supreme narcissism, the kind of narcissism at the heart of many mass shooters, the killer had live-streamed every second of it from the moment he first climbed into his Subaru.
The killing began when he was greeted at the door by a young worshipper who apparently didn’t recognize the menace in the costume the intruder was wearing—the black tunic, the off-the-rack tactical vest—or who didn’t see the garishly decorated killing machines in his hands, one of them fitted with a strobe light to blind and disorient the worshippers.
The young man welcomed the stranger, calling him “brother.”
The killer murdered him where he stood.
It ended—or this part of the attack did, anyway—minutes later as he sauntered back to his car, past a young woman who, wounded, made it as far as the street. “Help me!” she cried as she lay facedown in the gutter. “Help me!” He stepped to the curb and fatally shot her. In the back.
In between, while firing at up to three rounds per second, he killed forty-two innocent, unarmed people, most of them as they huddled together in corners of the mosque.
At one point during the attack, a young man, a head shorter and a stone lighter than the killer, jostled him. Perhaps, as the young man’s family later said, he was indeed making a heroic attempt to grab the murderer’s gun. Or maybe it was an accident. The video evidence is unclear. In any case, the young man bumped into him with no more force than might be expended by a retiree who elbows you while reaching for the second-to-last Christmas turkey in the frozen food section of Pak’nSave. It is clear that the killer was certain that he had nothing to fear.
The killer shot the young man from an arm’s length away. The young man died soon afterward. For the remaining minutes he spent inside the mosque, the killer faced no other resistance, and he seemed to revel in that, to bask in it.
After shooting the worshippers—most were killed or wounded within the first two minutes of the massacre—he returned again and again to the same two piles of bodies, firing into them as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, not because he needed to fire quickly but simply because he could.
He was so unhurried that during the shooting he clumsily dropped an extended magazine and had the time to pick it up. A few moments later, he took a breather, strolled back to his car, retrieved his other rifle, and jogged back toward the mosque. Before going in, he stepped to an alley and fired a couple of rounds.
Maybe he saw a figure at the far end of the alley. Maybe not. But he exalted in the moment. “You’re not going to get the bird today, boys,” he said gleefully. He then sauntered back into the mosque, stepping over the dead man by the door and two more he’d left dead nearby, then into the sanctuary where once again he senselessly fired round after round at those he had already shot.
And when he was finally finished with this part of the attack, he returned to his car—pausing briefly for one more murder along the way—and headed off to another mosque a few miles away where, though locked outside, he would kill nine more people before one unarmed man would unambiguously confront him and then pick up the empty shotgun the killer had dropped. The murderer—who finally did think he had something to fear—would turn tail and run. Police captured him a short time later. Needless to say, he didn’t resist.
But several minutes before that, after the attack at Al Noor and en route to continue the massacre at the Linwood Islamic Center, the grotesque costume the killer wore fell away. He might try to sell his viewers—and perhaps even try to sell himself—on the notion that there was some political or cultural motive that somehow perversely accounted for what he had done. But the transparent mask of other people’s ancient exploits and recent tragedies slipped. And the man behind them was naked for all the world to see.
As he stepped into his car, no cheery Old Empire military airs played, no rolling drums or brave fifes, no ethnic-cleansing drinking songs from somebody else’s genocidal war. No. He was blaring “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, a hackneyed old hit that has whipped acned, hormone-poisoned adolescent boys and twenty-something losers into impotent, self-indulgent frenzies for fifty years.
“I am the god of hellfire!” the singer boasts. The hell you are.
The murderer pulled out of the parking lot, drove a few yards, and in a spasm of gunfire, he inexplicably let loose a blast from his shotgun through his windshield and another through the glass of his passenger-side window. Then the tantrum passed, and he once again joined the traffic on the streets of Christchurch. He was a bit more aggressive now—the twenty-eight-year-old killer who has just murdered forty-two people in cold blood honked his horn impatiently at two women who were making their way over a crosswalk a little too slowly for him. But only a bit more aggressive. He still kept well below the speed limit and obeyed every traffic law. You can’t be too careful.
In the distance the siren of an emergency vehicle was approaching.
He didn’t seem particularly concerned by it. Instead, for the first time since he got into the car uttering the words “Subscribe to PewDiePie” (a reference to a YouTube personality from Sweden with millions of followers who is alleged to have made anti-Semitic comments), the murderer directly addressed what he imagined to be his rapt fans watching his livestream.
First, he expressed surprise—or was it disappointment—that there weren’t more women and children killed. He shrugged it off as a minor glitch in his planning. He had overlooked the fact that the women and children tended to show up later than the men for Friday prayers, he explained patiently. But it was slightly later now. Surely there’d be more of them at the next mosque.
“Shit happens,” he laughed coldly. And then, in perhaps the most inadvertently self-revealing moment of all, he tries to gaslight his audience, recasting the clumsy fumble of the extended magazine as some kind of heroic moment. “Left one full magazine back there, I know for sure,” he intones to the camera, consciously affecting the vocal equivalent of a thousand-yard stare. “Probably more.”
“Had to run along in the middle of the firefight and pick up the mag that fell. Pretty much instantly. There wasn’t even time to aim due to so many targets.”
Firefight.
Anyone who heard him use that word also knew that he had entered that mosque knowing he had nothing to fear. Because they had watched him do it. They had watched him gun down forty-two unarmed people who offered virtually no resistance. They saw him kill a man who greeted him as a brother with open arms and empty hands. They watched him fire again and again into the bodies of those he had already murdered. And they had watched him shoot a wounded woman in the back. Not a single shot had been fired in return. Not one.
He was so unhurried that during the shooting he clumsily dropped an extended magazine and had the time to pick it up. A few moments later, he took a breather, strolled back to his car, retrieved his other rifle, and jogged back toward the mosque. Before going in, he stepped to an alley and fired a couple of rounds.
Maybe he saw a figure at the far end of the alley. Maybe not. But he exalted in the moment. “You’re not going to get the bird today, boys,” he said gleefully. He then sauntered back into the mosque, stepping over the dead man by the door and two more he’d left dead nearby, then into the sanctuary where once again he senselessly fired round after round at those he had already shot.
And when he was finally finished with this part of the attack, he returned to his car—pausing briefly for one more murder along the way—and headed off to another mosque a few miles away where, though locked outside, he would kill nine more people before one unarmed man would unambiguously confront him and then pick up the empty shotgun the killer had dropped. The murderer—who finally did think he had something to fear—would turn tail and run. Police captured him a short time later. Needless to say, he didn’t resist.
But several minutes before that, after the attack at Al Noor and en route to continue the massacre at the Linwood Islamic Center, the grotesque costume the killer wore fell away. He might try to sell his viewers—and perhaps even try to sell himself—on the notion that there was some political or cultural motive that somehow perversely accounted for what he had done. But the transparent mask of other people’s ancient exploits and recent tragedies slipped. And the man behind them was naked for all the world to see.
As he stepped into his car, no cheery Old Empire military airs played, no rolling drums or brave fifes, no ethnic-cleansing drinking songs from somebody else’s genocidal war. No. He was blaring “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, a hackneyed old hit that has whipped acned, hormone-poisoned adolescent boys and twenty-something losers into impotent, self-indulgent frenzies for fifty years.
“I am the god of hellfire!” the singer boasts. The hell you are.
The murderer pulled out of the parking lot, drove a few yards, and in a spasm of gunfire, he inexplicably let loose a blast from his shotgun through his windshield and another through the glass of his passenger-side window. Then the tantrum passed, and he once again joined the traffic on the streets of Christchurch. He was a bit more aggressive now—the twenty-eight-year-old killer who has just murdered forty-two people in cold blood honked his horn impatiently at two women who were making their way over a crosswalk a little too slowly for him. But only a bit more aggressive. He still kept well below the speed limit and obeyed every traffic law. You can’t be too careful.
In the distance the siren of an emergency vehicle was approaching.
He didn’t seem particularly concerned by it. Instead, for the first time since he got into the car uttering the words “Subscribe to PewDiePie” (a reference to a YouTube personality from Sweden with millions of followers who is alleged to have made anti-Semitic comments), the murderer directly addressed what he imagined to be his rapt fans watching his livestream.
First, he expressed surprise—or was it disappointment—that there weren’t more women and children killed. He shrugged it off as a minor glitch in his planning. He had overlooked the fact that the women and children tended to show up later than the men for Friday prayers, he explained patiently. But it was slightly later now. Surely there’d be more of them at the next mosque.
“Shit happens,” he laughed coldly. And then, in perhaps the most inadvertently self-revealing moment of all, he tries to gaslight his audience, recasting the clumsy fumble of the extended magazine as some kind of heroic moment. “Left one full magazine back there, I know for sure,” he intones to the camera, consciously affecting the vocal equivalent of a thousand-yard stare. “Probably more.”
“Had to run along in the middle of the firefight and pick up the mag that fell. Pretty much instantly. There wasn’t even time to aim due to so many targets.”
Firefight.
Anyone who heard him use that word also knew that he had entered that mosque knowing he had nothing to fear. Because they had watched him do it. They had watched him gun down forty-two unarmed people who offered virtually no resistance. They saw him kill a man who greeted him as a brother with open arms and empty hands. They watched him fire again and again into the bodies of those he had already murdered. And they had watched him shoot a wounded woman in the back. Not a single shot had been fired in return. Not one.
Forget the sixteen-thousand-word manifesto the murderer sent to the prime minister of New Zealand. Everything you need to know about the murderer is in that one word.
Firefight.
There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots. It’s only human nature that we try to fill it. In the deafening silence in the aftermath of atrocities like the one committed against the people of Christchurch, our first response is to cram whatever we can into the gaping wound to try to stanch the bleeding. Dusty myths and dog-eared narratives, manifestos pecked out in the flickering light of a computer screen in a cheap apartment or a mother’s basement, we’ll clutch at anything to give meaning to the atrocities, anything that might make sense of the savagery in the hopes that we can know our enemy and combat him, even if it’s the grandiose tales the killer tells us and himself to decorate his murderous intent. We forget that the very first sin, the original sin in the Garden of Eden, was not murder: it was grandiosity and selfishness and bitter envy that inhabited one long, scaly coil, followed quickly by lies and self-deception. Only after that litany of sins slithered into the world did the crime of murder follow. Or so it said in that first book on my analyst’s bookshelf.
Within hours of the Christchurch massacre the airwaves around the world were pulsing with stories detailing the killer’s obsession with immigrants and the extremist views he held, as if that and that alone was what motivated him. We had done the same thing five months earlier, when a reportedly bitter, forty-six-year-old truck driver in Pennsylvania, apparently seeking revenge for his own failures in the world, posted to his racist, anti-Semitic far-right compatriots on the web that he was “going in,” as if he were a member of the 82nd Airborne parachuting behind the lines of the Wehrmacht on D-Day.2 He then stormed into a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Saturday morning to kill eleven Jews at prayer, among them senior citizens and a pair of disabled brothers.
Before that, we assumed we had found an explanation when a young killer waved the Confederate flag in our faces, as if that somehow justified the murders of members of the Bible study group at Emanuel AME Church. Just like the young man at the mosque door in Christchurch, the peaceful prayer group had welcomed the killer inside. And in 2009, when an army psychiatrist—a Muslim about to be deployed to Afghanistan who was described by his fellow soldiers as aloof, belligerent, and paranoid, according to an NPR report at the time3—opened fire on his comrades at Fort Hood, many in America accepted his own excuse: he was a jihadist terrorist acting against the policies of the United States when he murdered thirteen people.
Many Americans, among them prominent members of the US Senate, downplayed the idea that it could possibly be anything else and dismissed the possibility that there could have been a complex combination of factors that triggered the psychiatrist’s attack. They dismissed the possibility that he was another disturbed employee armed with a newly purchased semiautomatic handgun and a few extended magazines, committing the kind of mass atrocity that is ubiquitous enough in this country that we would have called it “going postal” had it happened in the 1980s or early 1990s at a US post office rather than an army base.
It couldn’t possibly be, many Americans believed and continue to believe, that the army major’s rampage was sparked by a preexisting and deepening rage and a psychological unraveling, and that jihadism gave his pathology a veneer of reason, a cause. It didn’t matter that coworkers would later tell investigators that the psychiatrist, a man reported to have an ego fragile enough to recoil at every perceived slight, had been overwhelmed by the horror stories of the returning veterans he treated, internalizing their stories, seething over them. The horrors of war that his patients had witnessed became all about him, they told investigators. It was beside the point that just like the moody, more depressive of the two killers at Columbine, the psychiatrist had begun to think of suicide, though as Lankford writes in The Myth of Martyrdom, he feared the judgment of a God who has fixed his canon against self-slaughter. This prodded him to wrap his suicidal impulses in grandiose visions of mass violence, which at least in his twisted reading of the Quran—a reading reinforced by other apostates on the Internet—was more pleasing to the Almighty.4
He certainly wouldn’t be the first to bear false witness against the Almighty and try to falsely finger God as a co-conspirator to justify his bloody impulses. History is replete with such tales, from grand mass slaughters by nations in places like Srebrenica to the manic, maladjusted teen at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts who claimed at trial that God had been whispering to him in the spaces between his synapses, urging him to take a semiautomatic rifle and kill students and teachers at his school in 1992. God has often stood accused of the crimes of men. To the best of my knowledge, He’s never directly answered the charges.
It could not be that the root causes of the psychiatrist’s rampage were at their core deeply personal and not all that different from the impulses that drove a racist, homophobic, misogynistic murderer from the featureless flatlands between Austin and Waco to drive his pickup truck to a Luby’s restaurant in nearby Killeen in 1991, barricade the door with it—just as the killer at West Nickel Mines would later do—and open fire on those inside. He killed twenty-three and wounded twenty-seven, targeting women especially, with a Ruger P89 in one hand, a Glock 17 in the other, shouting as he fired, “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers! This is what you’ve done to me and my family! Is it worth it? Tell me, is it worth it?”5
No. We tell ourselves that there’s a hard line between those we call terrorists, who act under cover of some grand political or cultural or religious cause, and those among us who kill for their own perverse personal reasons, though, as Lankford tells us, the line is seldom as hard and fast as that.
To their credit, against a wave of public opposition and in the teeth of a resolution by the Senate dubbing the attack “the worst act of terrorism on US soil since September 11, 2001,” neither the US Army nor the president at the time bowed to the psychiatrist’s insistence that he was anything more than a mass murderer.6
The Department of Defense officially listed the 2009 Fort Hood shooting as a case of “workplace violence.” The killer, who had graduated from Virginia Tech ten years before the massacre there, was not charged under federal terrorism statutes. Instead, he was convicted by court-martial of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder, and he was sentenced to death. As of this writing he is still being held in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he still insists he’s some kind of martyr to a cause. The order of execution will not endorse that claim.
None of this is to suggest that the killer at Fort Hood did not see himself as a terrorist, although he probably wouldn’t use that particular word. He did indeed haunt websites and chat rooms in the darkest corners of the Internet where jihadists are recruited and groomed. As he sank into deeper rage and increasingly embraced an operatic fantasy of his own demise, one in which he could see himself as a martyr, he saw every injury against him, real or imagined, small or large, through that prism, as part of an assault on Muslims writ large. He had—perhaps always—been so inclined. When, toward the end of his medical training, his fellow health professionals in the military failed to show what he believed was proper deference to a droning report he delivered, “The Koranic World View as It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military,” it wasn’t his writing, his research, or his style they were disrespecting, it was all of Islam.7
In time it appears the psychiatrist, who despite his Palestinian descent spoke virtually no Arabic, had become, in his mind, an avatar for the whole of the Muslim universe. When his car was keyed—allegedly by a solider who was indeed, a neighbor said, hostile to the psychiatrist’s religion—he filed that away as another attack on the whole of the Muslim world, another data point on a continuum that ran the gamut from petty vandalism to all-out war. And he did have several contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a onetime moderate Muslim cleric who, like the psychiatrist, had lived in Virginia before he transformed himself into the so-called “Bin Laden of the Internet.”8 Army investigators later concluded that the contacts were made in connection with legitimate research the psychiatrist was doing; and before he was killed in an American drone strike in 2011, al-Awlaki himself, in an interview with the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea that was later reported by the Washington Post, denied that he had directed the psychiatrist to attack his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.9 But then again, he didn’t really need to.
Firefight.
There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots. It’s only human nature that we try to fill it. In the deafening silence in the aftermath of atrocities like the one committed against the people of Christchurch, our first response is to cram whatever we can into the gaping wound to try to stanch the bleeding. Dusty myths and dog-eared narratives, manifestos pecked out in the flickering light of a computer screen in a cheap apartment or a mother’s basement, we’ll clutch at anything to give meaning to the atrocities, anything that might make sense of the savagery in the hopes that we can know our enemy and combat him, even if it’s the grandiose tales the killer tells us and himself to decorate his murderous intent. We forget that the very first sin, the original sin in the Garden of Eden, was not murder: it was grandiosity and selfishness and bitter envy that inhabited one long, scaly coil, followed quickly by lies and self-deception. Only after that litany of sins slithered into the world did the crime of murder follow. Or so it said in that first book on my analyst’s bookshelf.
Within hours of the Christchurch massacre the airwaves around the world were pulsing with stories detailing the killer’s obsession with immigrants and the extremist views he held, as if that and that alone was what motivated him. We had done the same thing five months earlier, when a reportedly bitter, forty-six-year-old truck driver in Pennsylvania, apparently seeking revenge for his own failures in the world, posted to his racist, anti-Semitic far-right compatriots on the web that he was “going in,” as if he were a member of the 82nd Airborne parachuting behind the lines of the Wehrmacht on D-Day.2 He then stormed into a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Saturday morning to kill eleven Jews at prayer, among them senior citizens and a pair of disabled brothers.
Before that, we assumed we had found an explanation when a young killer waved the Confederate flag in our faces, as if that somehow justified the murders of members of the Bible study group at Emanuel AME Church. Just like the young man at the mosque door in Christchurch, the peaceful prayer group had welcomed the killer inside. And in 2009, when an army psychiatrist—a Muslim about to be deployed to Afghanistan who was described by his fellow soldiers as aloof, belligerent, and paranoid, according to an NPR report at the time3—opened fire on his comrades at Fort Hood, many in America accepted his own excuse: he was a jihadist terrorist acting against the policies of the United States when he murdered thirteen people.
Many Americans, among them prominent members of the US Senate, downplayed the idea that it could possibly be anything else and dismissed the possibility that there could have been a complex combination of factors that triggered the psychiatrist’s attack. They dismissed the possibility that he was another disturbed employee armed with a newly purchased semiautomatic handgun and a few extended magazines, committing the kind of mass atrocity that is ubiquitous enough in this country that we would have called it “going postal” had it happened in the 1980s or early 1990s at a US post office rather than an army base.
It couldn’t possibly be, many Americans believed and continue to believe, that the army major’s rampage was sparked by a preexisting and deepening rage and a psychological unraveling, and that jihadism gave his pathology a veneer of reason, a cause. It didn’t matter that coworkers would later tell investigators that the psychiatrist, a man reported to have an ego fragile enough to recoil at every perceived slight, had been overwhelmed by the horror stories of the returning veterans he treated, internalizing their stories, seething over them. The horrors of war that his patients had witnessed became all about him, they told investigators. It was beside the point that just like the moody, more depressive of the two killers at Columbine, the psychiatrist had begun to think of suicide, though as Lankford writes in The Myth of Martyrdom, he feared the judgment of a God who has fixed his canon against self-slaughter. This prodded him to wrap his suicidal impulses in grandiose visions of mass violence, which at least in his twisted reading of the Quran—a reading reinforced by other apostates on the Internet—was more pleasing to the Almighty.4
He certainly wouldn’t be the first to bear false witness against the Almighty and try to falsely finger God as a co-conspirator to justify his bloody impulses. History is replete with such tales, from grand mass slaughters by nations in places like Srebrenica to the manic, maladjusted teen at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts who claimed at trial that God had been whispering to him in the spaces between his synapses, urging him to take a semiautomatic rifle and kill students and teachers at his school in 1992. God has often stood accused of the crimes of men. To the best of my knowledge, He’s never directly answered the charges.
It could not be that the root causes of the psychiatrist’s rampage were at their core deeply personal and not all that different from the impulses that drove a racist, homophobic, misogynistic murderer from the featureless flatlands between Austin and Waco to drive his pickup truck to a Luby’s restaurant in nearby Killeen in 1991, barricade the door with it—just as the killer at West Nickel Mines would later do—and open fire on those inside. He killed twenty-three and wounded twenty-seven, targeting women especially, with a Ruger P89 in one hand, a Glock 17 in the other, shouting as he fired, “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers! This is what you’ve done to me and my family! Is it worth it? Tell me, is it worth it?”5
No. We tell ourselves that there’s a hard line between those we call terrorists, who act under cover of some grand political or cultural or religious cause, and those among us who kill for their own perverse personal reasons, though, as Lankford tells us, the line is seldom as hard and fast as that.
To their credit, against a wave of public opposition and in the teeth of a resolution by the Senate dubbing the attack “the worst act of terrorism on US soil since September 11, 2001,” neither the US Army nor the president at the time bowed to the psychiatrist’s insistence that he was anything more than a mass murderer.6
The Department of Defense officially listed the 2009 Fort Hood shooting as a case of “workplace violence.” The killer, who had graduated from Virginia Tech ten years before the massacre there, was not charged under federal terrorism statutes. Instead, he was convicted by court-martial of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder, and he was sentenced to death. As of this writing he is still being held in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he still insists he’s some kind of martyr to a cause. The order of execution will not endorse that claim.
None of this is to suggest that the killer at Fort Hood did not see himself as a terrorist, although he probably wouldn’t use that particular word. He did indeed haunt websites and chat rooms in the darkest corners of the Internet where jihadists are recruited and groomed. As he sank into deeper rage and increasingly embraced an operatic fantasy of his own demise, one in which he could see himself as a martyr, he saw every injury against him, real or imagined, small or large, through that prism, as part of an assault on Muslims writ large. He had—perhaps always—been so inclined. When, toward the end of his medical training, his fellow health professionals in the military failed to show what he believed was proper deference to a droning report he delivered, “The Koranic World View as It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military,” it wasn’t his writing, his research, or his style they were disrespecting, it was all of Islam.7
In time it appears the psychiatrist, who despite his Palestinian descent spoke virtually no Arabic, had become, in his mind, an avatar for the whole of the Muslim universe. When his car was keyed—allegedly by a solider who was indeed, a neighbor said, hostile to the psychiatrist’s religion—he filed that away as another attack on the whole of the Muslim world, another data point on a continuum that ran the gamut from petty vandalism to all-out war. And he did have several contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a onetime moderate Muslim cleric who, like the psychiatrist, had lived in Virginia before he transformed himself into the so-called “Bin Laden of the Internet.”8 Army investigators later concluded that the contacts were made in connection with legitimate research the psychiatrist was doing; and before he was killed in an American drone strike in 2011, al-Awlaki himself, in an interview with the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea that was later reported by the Washington Post, denied that he had directed the psychiatrist to attack his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.9 But then again, he didn’t really need to.
Our shadowy adversaries across the globe have learned how to exploit one of our Achilles’ heels, our lax gun laws. A 2017 article in the official magazine of ISIS, for example, urged its followers to visit American gun shows, exercise their Second Amendment rights, and wait for the opportunity to use them against us.10 They have also learned to exploit another of our Achilles’ heels. It’s that peculiar, toxic cocktail of grievance and grandiosity, of victimhood-as-status, that sociologists Campbell and Manning write about. It’s a combination found in abundance in the societies that can afford it, in the affluent—our adversaries would call it decadent—West, where there’s a perhaps unrealistic expectation of personal success and an incentive to view one’s self as a victim when that success proves elusive.
Inside their echo chambers on the Internet, the disturbed, the isolated, the wrathful—usually but not exclusively white men who believe their primacy and privilege are being eroded by the modest gains of women or minorities or immigrants or non-cisgendered people—can pick and choose from a vast menu of Others to blame for what they see as their diminished status, says Casey Kelly, author of Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood.11 Inside those echo chambers they can take on the mantle of a savior, a martyr, a dark hero to some twisted cause. And they will be encouraged to do so. Praised for it. Celebrated for it.
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked,” Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, that second book on my analyst’s bookshelf. “They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”12
Inside the echo chambers of extremism of any stripe, bitterness is a virtue, and the more aggressively it’s displayed, the more highly those who gather in those low places regard each other. And they gather there by the score. These virtual places serve as magnets for the angry, for those with little success to point to in the real world, for those with festering envy and a grandiose sense of themselves. These websites gather once-isolated loners from all over the nation, indeed from across the world.
Take the truck driver from Pittsburgh, a guy whose estranged father had committed suicide after being
charged with rape and whose stepfather, it seems, had been accused of similar offenses, according to a deeply researched profile of him done by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after the massacre at Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. A high school dropout—he never finished his senior year, the Post-Gazette reported—he eventually drifted into a low-paying job driving a truck for a local bakery and later quit that to become an even more isolated over the-road truck driver.13 Back then he would drape himself in a borrowed dignity, the paper reported. Whenever he had a task to complete, the truck driver, who had never served a day in uniform, would affect a faux military bearing and snap, “I’m going in”—the same words he used before beginning his attack at Tree of Life.
This man who barely made a ripple in the real world found a way to make himself seem important in a virtual one. At least in his own eyes. His gateway drug was a local far-right talk-radio program called The WarRoom, a conspiracy-minded broadcast that still today fans the smoldering resentments of its listeners with tales of a grand plot by the “blue hats” of the United Nations to subjugate the world. He had started listening in the 1990s, and by the time he was in his late twenties, he had earned himself the title of unofficial archivist for the program. But that was all he earned. As the manager of the company that ran the broadcast back then told the Post-Gazette, they never considered putting him on the payroll. The host of the broadcast later told the Washington Post that he had no recollection of ever having even met the truck driver.14
He also seems to have found status in his own eyes through firearms. According to the Post-Gazette, he spent considerable time at a local rifle range in the state game lands, and he apparently imagined himself—as these killers so often do—as a gunslinging hero facing off against some operatic threat from a globalist horde. The paper quoted one acquaintance who recalled that he used to imagine invaders coming at him in body armor and helmets and practiced leveling his shotgun at what he imagined would be face level to make sure that he killed his make-believe adversaries.
And as the years passed, whenever he wasn’t on the range or on the road, it seemed this high school dropout who imagined himself to be a seasoned lone warrior was on the net, haunting far-right websites. He favored the kind of festering sites where the ever-thin line between fears of some global elite taking over the world and the outright anti-Semitism that fantasy often masks vanishes altogether. Studies have shown that in recent years such websites have proliferated, and their impact is predictable: in one year alone, from 2016 to 2017, the number of anti-Semitic incidents spiked by nearly 60 percent.15
In the weeks leading up to the killings, the truck driver—and perhaps millions of other Americans who
shared his overheated fear of foreigners—had been whipped into a frenzy. The president of the United States, who had staked his election campaign on stoking fears of an invasion of migrants and refugees on our southern border, albeit in less blatantly anti-Semitic terms, now claimed that a “caravan” of migrants was making its way across Mexico toward the United States. He signaled that these hungry, sometimes shoeless families of migrants should be treated as a military threat.
In the dark corners of the web where the Tree of Life killer spent his days, in those places where the ubiquitous sense of grievance and resentment and fear now openly embraced in our culture is distilled down to its toxic essence, the “threat” of the “caravan” was taken seriously. For the truck driver, it seems, it created a perfect vertical alignment of all of the grudges he bore. Globalists in the thrall of internationalist Jews were fomenting an invasion, he believed, and they were using the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a respected one-hundred-year-old nonprofit that has eased the transition for many legal immigrants since the days of pickle barrels and schmatta shops on Delancey Street. From there it was a short step to his fixation on the Tree of Life synagogue, a formidable building on a tree-lined street in the Squirrel Hill section of town where Fred Rogers had once lived—the real Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood—shared by three branches of Judaism. It’s not at all clear that the Tree of Life killer cared about the distinctions among them. They were Jews, and in his twisted fantasy world their goal was to diminish him. Personally. They were props in his own grandiose drama, a drama in which he was the “good guy with a gun” standing up to invading hordes.
Whatever his failures, whatever bad cards life had dealt him, and however badly he may have played them, at least he was a middle-aged white man in a country where, in his mind, that meant he was entitled to something, and that entitlement was being threatened. He might have little to distinguish himself in the real world, but in the virtual world he could claim to be an avenger, a warrior, without fear of being challenged or ridiculed. Rather, he would be lionized as he no doubt believed was his due.
In truth, his resentments and grudges, his willingness to kill, and his conviction that doing so would grant him a status that seems to have otherwise eluded him may not have been all that different from the petty resentments of a sixty-one-year-old junk dealer who turned active shooter in 2013. About to be evicted from his home, a shed with a bucket for a toilet on a trash-strewn piece of property not far from my home in northeastern Pennsylvania, he had racked up thousands of dollars in unpaid fines for using his land as a trash heap. The municipality had condemned his land and had ordered him to vacate when he stormed into a municipal committee meeting in Ross Township armed with a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle and a handgun and murdered three people before he was tackled and restrained by an unarmed municipal employee. At his sentencing—he was ordered to serve three consecutive life sentences for murder—he spent forty minutes railing about how he was a “victim” of a “conspiracy” that had been launched against him when he was ordered to clean up his yard.16
I got a glimpse into the Ross Township killer’s mindset in 2017 when I wrote him a letter trying to arrange an interview in prison. In his multipage response, he made it clear that he believed that his murders had given him some sort of unearned celebrity and status, and he set forth a list of demands, including specific amounts of money I needed to deposit into his prison commissary account before I would be granted the honor of an interview. I wasn’t going to waste a stamp telling him to go to hell. I didn’t need to. Pretty much every question I had, the junkman had answered with that letter.
To the extent that there was any difference at all between the killer in Ross Township and the murderer at Tree of Life, it was that the killer in Pittsburgh reached for a more elaborate justification when he reached for his rifle, and he chose his targets for what they represented in his mind rather than what they had allegedly done to him personally.
Just before the massacre, the Tree of Life killer posted one last time on the Internet. On one of the fringe social media sites he frequented most often, he wrote, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in to kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics.”17
He signed off with the same faux-militaristic phrase he’d used when he was ordered to load a tray of hot cross buns into the back of his truck, back in the days when he still hauled bread for the bakery.
“I’m going in,” he wrote. He had loaded his legally purchased Colt AR-15 in his rental car, as well as the shotgun he’d used to fantasize about face shots to blue-helmeted globalists. He’d leave that shotgun in the car because he knew no one inside the shul on an early Shabbos morning would be wearing body armor or helmets. He also had three .357 Glock handguns when he climbed into the car, headed off toward the synagogue, and pulled into a handicapped parking space.
I have no idea whether he engaged the emergency brake.
As the number of casualties of mass public shootings has spiked in recent years, and as the research into the minds of these murderers has evolved, the mass media has, by and large, gotten wise to the fact that a thirst for glory and self-aggrandizement is at least one of the factors that drives these killers. They want to be famous in a culture that, as discussed earlier, often prizes fame above all else. In that, they’re just like the rest of us. Only more so. In response, it’s become standard practice in the media to downplay the killer’s name and to focus instead on the lives that these killers snuffed out. That’s a good thing.
But here’s a troubling question. Do we risk making a similar mistake when we accept on their face and almost without question the claims of some perverse political motives made by these killers?
To be sure, there is a political dimension to the claims made by some of these shooters. As one of the early readers of this manuscript noted, “If inflammatory political rhetoric stokes a shooter’s paranoia/anger/psychosis as he shoots up a synagogue or a Walmart in a border city, certainly the impact of his actions matter just as much, if not more, than what was going on in his head.”
Perhaps.
There is no question that the swamps these killers swim in darkly reflect troubling aspects of our political culture: the angst felt primarily by white males who see themselves as losing status against the comparatively modest gains made by women and people of color and other groups. Nor is there any question that their anger has been stoked by a political culture that has sought to commoditize their angst.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that the casualties in many of these attacks were targeted because of
who they were and what they represented in the killers’ twisted and stunted philosophies. Jews died because they were Jews. Hispanics were murdered because of their ethnic heritage. Women were killed because they were not men. The killer psychiatrist at Fort Hood may not have been a soldier in a global struggle, but the people the psychiatrist murdered—soldiers in uniform, on active duty—certainly died while defending their country.
The killer at Poway, in San Diego—who also wrote a rambling, juvenile manifesto in which he cloaked himself in verses from the Bible and the white supremacist playbook—and the murderer at Tree of Life may have wanted the world to see them as victims of some international conspiracy, but is their justification any more real or based in fact than the so-called conspiracy by a township committee to get the junkman to throw out the trash he had accumulated?
At their core, they share at least one thing in common, a trait that transcends the readily available political
causes that they espouse. What they share is a sense of themselves as victims and a narcissistic image of themselves as armed avengers, destined for some perverse fame.
Victims.
It’s ironic that the Jews who survived the attacks at Pittsburgh and Poway, members of a people who have actually been targeted by real conspiracies at least since their neighbors in Egypt conspired to drive them out of Alexandria more than two thousand years ago, most emphatically do not act like victims.
In the late spring of 2019, a killer who claimed to be inspired by the murderer from Christchurch and the
killer from Pittsburgh opened fire at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, killing a sixty-year-old woman and wounding three people, among them an eight-year-old child and the rabbi, whose hand was mangled by a bullet. Just days after that attack, the congregation presented the rabbi with a gift, a yad, a Torah pointer that had been purchased almost on a whim by a member of his congregation months earlier. It was modified so he could overcome his injury and continue to intone the ancient verses.
Hannah Kaye, the daughter of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, the only fatality in that attack, could easily have focused on the horror of it—her father, a physician, had rushed to perform CPR on the wounded woman and collapsed, a witness told me. He collapsed when he realized that it was his wife he was frantically trying to revive.
Yet Hannah Kaye had just barely gotten up from sitting shiva—the traditional seven-day mourning period among Jews—when the Internet and social media lit up with her joyous celebration of her mother’s life, praising her as an eshet chayil, a Righteous Woman who embodies the eternal virtues commanded in the Torah: generosity and humility, courage and faithfulness. It had been Lori who had purchased the yad, a congregant told me. There’s a magnificent defiance in that.
Dean Root, a congregant at the Tree of Life who had just arrived at the synagogue as the shooting began and who provided sanctuary in his car to at least one person fleeing the massacre, told me that in the wake of the attack, the three often-bickering sibling strands of Judaism that shared the building became more united. Their adherents rededicated themselves to the core values of their shared faith, he told me, not the least of which is the obligation to care for the stranger in your midst, embodied by the work of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. That daily victory over darkness, that refusal to claim the mantle of victim was also trumpeted on the web.
I hope that galls the hell out of the murderer.
These devotees are not alone in refusing victimhood. Indeed, as we’ll see in chapter 9, at least since Sandy Hook, the survivors of mass shootings—and those touched by them—have increasingly used the same technology the killers use to stoke their murderous impulses. They use the same technology that lionizes the killers and even amplifies the impact of their crimes, broadcasting them in real time to people all over the nation and the world, to announce to the world that they have indeed survived. More than that, organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety, Rep. Gabby Giffords’s foundation, and the March for Our Lives (established by the survivors of the Parkland massacre in Florida) have tried to turn the virtual word the killers wielded into a million digital plowshares, using the Internet to build support for initiatives that they hope might combat the epidemic of gun violence in this country.
That light may never make it down to the depths of the web where the damaged vessels dwell that serve as incubators for these killers. But it’s a start.
And it’s worth remembering that these websites did not make the killers out of whole cloth. In many cases they brought the cloth themselves, and in those parts of the web they got help turning them into costumes. As Lankford writes in The Myth of Martyrdom, even if the Virginia-born psychiatrist at Fort Hood had not been a Muslim, had not found a sense of belonging among other wannabe jihadists on the web, even if he had been a Christian or a Jew, “he would still have had severe personal problems and the inability to handle them.”
“He would just have attacked somewhere else instead.”18 Regardless of what they tell themselves. Regardless of what we tell ourselves.
Of course, these killers, depending on their own identities, are drawn to the hate-filled websites of Islamic extremism or to the flickering torches of the white supremacist movement and gravitate to the websites that these racists wallow in. Those places are cesspools of self-pity, and that perceived sense of victimhood is a defining characteristic of mass shooters, the experts like Lankford, Meloy, and Kelly tell us.
Inside the imaginary walls of these electronic medieval cities that defy borders and span the globe, guys like the Christchurch shooter, who barely warrant a glance in the real world, can fashion themselves as kings. They can give full rein to their grandiosity and imagine themselves as twisted heroes out of some stunted adolescent version of an ancient nationalist saga.
Those sites provide them succor and cover and offer whole identities that they can refine to reinforce their own murderous peculiarities.
And for that, all of those who gather there are culpable for every death at Christchurch and Pittsburgh and Poway and Charleston and Fort Hood. But it would be a stretch to imagine that they made these killers out of nothing. These criminals, in many cases, almost certainly had the makings of killers long before they ever found those sites.
“I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing,” the villain Edmond says in act 1, scene 2 of King Lear, in that third book on my analyst’s bookshelf.
As I said before: maybe I was wrong. Maybe that shrink all those years ago was onto something.
Seamus McGraw is a journalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, as well as to the Huffington Post, Playboy, Popular Mechanics, and Fox Latino. He is the author of The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone, Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change, and A Thirsty Land: The Fight for Water in Texas.
1. Terrie Morgan-Besecker and David Singleton, “Eric Frein Infatuated with Serbian Military,” Scranton Times-Tribune, October 12, 2014.
2. United States v. Robert Bowers, Criminal No. 18-292, superseding indictment filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, January 29, 2019.
3. Daniel Zwerdling, “Walter Reed Officials Asked: Was Hasan Psychotic?,” NPR.org, November 11, 2009.
4. Adam Lankford, The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 93.
5. Paula Chin, “A Texas Massacre,” People, November 4, 1991.
6. A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack, special report from Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, February 2011.
7. Dana Priest, “Fort Hood Suspect Warned of Threats within the Ranks,” Washington Post, November 10, 2009.
8. David Johnson and Scott Shane, “U.S. Knew of Suspect’s Ties to Radical Cleric,” New York Times, November 9, 2009.
9. Sudarsan Raghavan, “Cleric Says He Was Confidant to Hasan,” Washington Post, November 16, 2009.
10. Tessa Berensen, “Isis Tells Followers It’s ‘Easy’ to Get Firearms from U.S. Gun Shows,” Time, May 5, 2017.
11. Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 2.
12. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 58.
13. Rich Lord, “How Robert Bowers Went from Conservative to White Nationalist,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 10, 2018.
14. William Wan, Annie Gowan, and Tim Craig, “Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect Left Fleeting Impression in Neighborhoods He Lived in for Decades,” Washington Post, October 21, 2018.
15. 2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, ADL, adl.org/resources/reports/2017-audit-of-anti-semitic-incidents#themes-and-trends-.
16. “Rockne Newell Pleads Guilty to Killing 3, Gets Three Life Sentences,” Associated Press, May 30, 2015.
17. Lord, “Bowers from Conservative to White Nationalist.”
18. Lankford, Myth of Martyrdom, 114.
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