Was the attack terror related?

That’s the central (and sometimes almost the only) question asked now in the immediate aftermath of violence – and for good reason. All of us know that what happens next – the social and political meaning of the crime – hinges almost entirely upon the answer. Speculation about the London stabbing has followed a similar pattern, since everyone knows that a connection to Islamic State (Isis) will entirely change the significance of otherwise uncontested facts.

When, on 20 July, a man rammed a Sydney police station in a car loaded with flammable material, early reports described the episode as a “terrorist attack”. Conservative MP George Christensen provided a taste of what might have followed had those accounts checked out: immediately, he took to Facebook, calling for a national response to “radical Islamism”.

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But Christensen had jumped the gun. Subsequent reporting identified the assailant as a 61-year-old white man with mental health problems, and the story almost immediately dropped from the headlines. The act itself hadn’t changed – someone has still sought to set a police station alight – but now the crime meant something altogether different. No one called for an urgent summit about mental health. There were no cries for increased funding to crisis intervention teams or new legislation to regulate treatment. There was no panic. There was almost no reaction at all.

The peculiar contrast between the terrorist crimes that reshape public debate and the non-terrorist crimes that don’t, becomes even starker in the aftermath of mass shootings, even as the incidents themselves seem harder and harder to tell apart.

Take the following description:

A heavily armed male, or just occasionally males, enter an area where people congregate and begins shooting victims indiscriminately, continuing with the killing until they turn their guns on themselves, or are shot and killed by police.

Today, most people would assume the passage describes a terrorist atrocity – the latest outrage by adherents of Isis, perhaps. In reality, it comes from forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen’s study of what he calls “autogenic massacres”, a term he coins specifically to distinguish mass murders like the Port Arthur rampage in Australia or the Sandy Hook massacre in the US from killings with an external motivation (such as terrorism).

Mullen writes:

A particular form of mass killing has emerged in western society in which a gunman slaughters victims, apparently chosen largely at random or selected indiscriminately from a particular social grouping … Mass killings of this type, unlike family slayings and killings as part of other criminal enterprises, appear to be a modern phenomenon in western society. Reports of autogenic massacres do not even begin to appear until the 20th century and only emerge as a recurring theme in the last 30 years.

Subsequent research has amended that claim somewhat. In his study, The patterns and prevalence of mass murder in twentieth-century America, Grant Duwe does find instances of crimes fitting the same pattern, particularly during the 1930s. Nonetheless, Duwe accepts Mullen’s main point: in the past 50 years, spectacular murder sprees have become more and more common.

From the 1966 massacre committed by Charles Whitman in which he gunned down 16 and wounded 30 atop the University of Texas tower to the 1999 Columbine High School killings, mass public shootings have become increasingly prevalent. Even though we see relatively high percentages of mass public shootings during the 1930s (17%) and 1940s (23%), there were only 21 incidents that took place between 1900 and 1965. Since 1966, however, there have been 95 more. The increase in mass public shootings has been most apparent since 1980, for over half … have taken place during the last two decades.

Duwe wrote those words in 2004. Last year, the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight explained how the trend had developed: “[t]here have been more total mass shooting incidents and deaths [in the US] in the 11 years starting with 2005 than there were in the previous 23 years combined.”

But our new familiarity with autogenic mass killings also obscures something else: the changing nature of terrorist violence. Specifically, the spectacular atrocities conducted by men self-identifying with Isis have redefined our understanding of terrorism, so that the act now seems almost synonymous with random public murder.

Again, in the past, matters were different.

Mateen’s profile seems much closer to that of a rampage murderer than a terrorist operative.

Contrary to what might be imagined, if we graph terror incidents in the United States over the last few decades, we see a constant and dramatic downturn from a peak in about 1970 (with only a very slight recent upturn in the last year or so). That’s because most of the recent terrorism in America emerged from the tumultuous 60s, as groups on the right and the left fought over the meaning of the social change underway.

The crimes committed by terrorists historically involved an array of acts: political assassinations (generally of public figures), bombings (often of symbolically important locations), kidnappings, skyjackings and so on. Some organisations and individuals did, of course, target civilians. But very few terrorist groups embraced public and indiscriminate slaughter as an end in itself, for the simple reason that mass murder doesn’t win political support.

Or, to put it another way, murders committed by terrorists tended to look very different from murders conducted by non-political rampage killers.

Now, however, they often don’t.

Think of the attack on the gay club in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people died and 53 others were wounded. On 12 June 2016, Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub armed with a Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun , and began killing everyone he saw. From a description of the crime alone, there’s no way of knowing whether the perpetrator was (to use Mullen’s terminology) an autogenic killer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flowers left outside the Pulse nightclub as a memorial to the 12 June shootings there, where Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others. Photograph: John Raoux/AP

In fact, during the rampage Mateen declared his allegiance to Isis and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – and, for that reason, was widely described as a terrorist. But he doesn’t seem to have been particularly religious. We know, for instance, that he drank and had affairs; it’s also been suggested that he was sexually attracted to other men. Indeed, in many respects, Mateen’s profile seems much closer to that of a rampage murderer than a terrorist operative. He was unsuccessful in his career. He had a history of physical violence in his relationships and consistently abused steroids. His ex-wife describes him as “mentally unstable and mentally ill”.

In his fascinating article Lone Wolf Terrorist or Deranged Shooter?, Joel A Capellan examines the perpetrators of what he calls “ideologically active shooter events” in the US: that is, gun massacres in which the killers saw themselves as motivated by a political or social cause.

He concludes that the ideological and non-ideological perpetrators of mass shootings are actually remarkably similar:

Both ideological and non-ideological active shooters tend to be white males in their 30s, with rather dysfunctional adult lives. They tend to be single/divorced, unemployed, have low levels of education, and suffer from mental illness. These similarities suggests that “lone wolves” and “deranged shooters” may be outcomes of the same social and psychological processes. The only meaningful difference may be that for ideological shooters ideological extremism is intertwined with their personal frustrations and aversions toward society. These findings are consistent with the idea that lone wolves and deranged shooters are but a part of a larger phenomenon of lone-actor grievance-fueled violence. And as such, it is not surprising that they share very similar personal profiles.

Now, we need to be careful not to collapse politics into psychology. Whatever else was happening in Mateen’s life, his repetition of Isis slogans during the murders indicate that Islamist ideology provided, at the very least, a trigger for his violence. It’s perfectly possible that, without Isis doctrine to legitimate his violence, Mateen might have remained merely another ordinarily unhappy individual.

For that reason, one cannot discuss terrorism in the west without reference to the ongoing US military interventions in the years after 2001. Osama bin Laden mounted the 9/11 attacks knowing that the inevitable response would polarise public opinion along “clash of civilisations” lines, with Islamism becoming the most obvious alternative for those outraged by injustices in the Muslim world.

Bush’s disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq exceeded all of bin Laden’s expectations, even if Isis has now largely supplanted al-Qaida. Think, for instance, of the catastrophe that’s befallen the people of Iraq and Syria, where continuous conflict has rendered democratic and secular politics impossibly difficult, and made possible the murderous nihilism of Abu al-Baghdadi.

The Washington Post recently described Barack Obama as bequeathing to his successor “a state of quasi-war that could extend for years to come”. It’s not difficult to understand how that semi-permanent conflict drives both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia, both of which will sporadically manifest in the form of terrorism.

But can we also identify a connection between war and the marked increase of ostensibly autogenic massacres?

In my book, Killing: Misadventures in Violence, I investigated the strange psychological appeal that combat exerts, even – and perhaps particularly – over those who recognise its horror. Think of the first world war: greeted with a giddy exhilaration by many young men, who hailed violent conflict as an antidote to the banality of modernity.

Again and again in the literature of the time, you see the same argument. Industrial civilisation might have brought material comfort but it had also dissolved the older social ties in which men and women found meaning. The factory and the office were soulless and emasculating, while technology and bureaucracy stripped adventure and romance from ordinary life. That’s the context for Rupert Brooke’s famous call to his generation to turn away from a world grown “old and cold and weary”, to leave behind the “half-men” who would not fight, and to plunge into purifying war “as swimmers into cleanness leaping”.

The current insistence on entirely separating ideological and non-ideological rampages seems rather perverse

In his recent Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the veteran war correspondent Sebastian Junger makes a similar argument about modern conflicts. Modern society has, he argues, “perfected the art of making people not feel necessary”. By contrast, combat radically simplifies life; it promises honour and purpose and camaraderie to men who might otherwise never experience such things.



That’s why, as he says, “for many people … war feels better than peace.”

In researching Killing, I interviewed a young man called Jeremiah Workman who’d earned a Navy Cross by killing more than 20 insurgents with grenades and small arms fire in Fallujah in 2004. He was ferociously patriotic, a spokesperson for the pro-war group Veterans for Freedom. But he was also unabashedly nostalgic for what he’d left behind in Iraq.

“Just about anyone you talk to,” he said, “[who has been] over there, they want to go back. It’s very dangerous but life is so simple …”

Then he spoke about combat itself.

I tell people all the time, nothing I do from this point on in my life is ever going to compare. Ever. I do a lot of panel discussions and things, and I tell people, I could win the lottery today, have $200m, have fast cars, mansions, you name it, and still, it’s not going to compare to that feeling of leading marines, other human beings into combat and doing what we did there. It’s almost like I’m going through the motions now for the rest of my life. It’s a hundred per cent true. If I went out today and became a doctor, a chemist, and found the cure for cancer, I mean nothing … I can’t see anything that will ever compare to that feeling…

Junger quotes Dr Rachel Yehuda, the director of traumatic stress studies at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “[Combat is] the most important thing someone has ever done – especially since these people are so young when they go in – and it’s probably the first time they’ve ever been free, completely, of societal constraints.”

As that passage implies, if combat appeals, it’s partly because it offers an escape from peace.

“Given the profound alienation of modern society,” Junger writes, “when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life.”

Now consider another famous poem from the Great War. In Into Battle, Julian Grenfell presents combat as a kind of resurrection, since “he is dead who will not fight/And who dies fighting has increase”. Strikingly, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the conclusion of the poem reads like an invocation of the berserker state of the rage murderer.

And when the burning moment breaks,

And all things else are out of mind,

And only joy of battle takes

Him by the throat, and makes him blind,

[…]

The thundering line of battle stands,

And in the air death moans and sings;

But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,

And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Grenfell found his own “burning moment” by dying in combat in France. But, of course, the first and the second world wars were mass conflicts, struggles that touched, to some extent at least, most of the population.

Today’s wars (at least for westerners) are not. That’s one of Junger’s key points: the experiential gulf between those who fight and those who don’t has probably never been greater. At the same time, since 2001, public life has been dominated by Iraq and Afghanistan and their ramifications. Is it so surprising, then, that lost and dysfunctional individuals of the kind Capellan describes instigate murderous violence as a way of giving themselves, even if only for an instant, a clarity and purpose they’ve never felt before?

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“It may be worth considering,” says Junger, “whether middle-class American life – for all its material good fortune – has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.”

The reference to “men” here is significant. The values combat promises to restore are those of a patriarchal order, as per Brooke’s dismissal of the “half-men” who won’t fight. The academics Marissa A. Harrison and Thomas G. Bowers studied 91 cases of autogenic massacre – and in 90 of the cases they reviewed, the perpetrators were male.

Again, the argument’s not that the stated reason a murderer gives for his crimes should be ignored. No doubt the rhetoric of Isis did influence Omar Mateen, just as the Islamophobic calls for counter-jihad helped trigger Anders Breivik’s murders in Norway.

Yet the current insistence on entirely separating ideological and non-ideological rampages seems rather perverse given how closely autogenic and non-autogenic massacres now resemble each other. The accelerating rate of non-political mass murders suggests that, at very least, those calling for more killings are sowing seeds in fertile ground.

If that’s the case, ending the carnage may require more than simply ending the wars (as necessary as that remains). We need also a more profound discussion about constructing a different kind of peace.