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About the Episode
What if we considered gun violence as an issue of national security? Increasingly, terrorist groups, and specifically white supremacist extremist terrorists, have been turning to guns as instruments of terror for attacks in the United States.
Sonali sits down with Lou Klarevas, political scientist and author of Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings, to talk about the intersection of gun violence and security studies. They discuss how and why most deadly terrorist attacks in the United States are now perpetrated using firearms. And she talks with Colin Clarke, a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center about the rise of white supremacist extremist terrorism in particular. Finally, she talks with her sister, Anjana Rajan, who has worked on designing an approach to identifying and preventing attacks by white supremacist extremists using cryptography as a fellow at The Aspen Institute. Listen to find out more about the intersection between gun violence research and national security.
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Episode transcript below!
Related Media and Resources
Learn more about Colin Clarke’s work at the Soufan Center
Firearms Have Killed 82 of the 86 Victims of Post 9/11 Terror by Lou Klarevas | The Trace
Combating Domestic Terrorism by Anjana Rajan: Learn more about Anjana’s information escrow project to combat domestic terrorism at the Aspen Institute.
An interview between Sonali and Lou Klarevas about Preventing Gun Violence and Understanding Gun Reform on the Media and Social Change Podcast
Colin Clarke video interview on the rise of the incel movement and far-right extremism | Global News
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Lou: I remember, you know, just teaching this course , on counterterrorism, it was a graduate seminar on counter terrorism, and the Virginia Tech shooting happened. And, you know, 32 people were killed in one day, you know, act of, you know, senseless gun violence and a light bulb went off. And, you know, the idea was, in my head was like, well, you know, given how well we've done, to kind of control aviation, terrorism, what we're doing to control bombings, and the fact that you really don't kill a lot of people in stabbing rampages, I realized like guns are going to become the means of choice for people who want to commit, crimes, that would be what you would call security crimes or you know crimes against, you know, the Homeland.
Sonali: The voice you just heard was Lou Klarevas, political scientist, and research professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. In this episode of (Re)search for Solutions, we talk with Lou and other experts about gun violence, from the perspective of security studies. Terrorists have increasingly turned to firearms in recent years as a weapon of choice of politically motivated attacks in the United States. We delve into to why that is,
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Sonali: how white supremacist extremist terrorism has been growing in particular, and what are some ways that people are addressing and not addressing the threat of mass gun violence by terrorists.
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Sonali: (Re)search for Solutions is a series where we cover research related to pressing issues in our world today. During this season, we're focusing on unexpected and creative ways that researchers are looking at solutions to the persistence of gun violence. I'm Sonali Rajan, a professor in the department of Health and Behavior Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, working with the Media and Social Change Lab.
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Sonali: Lou Klarevas is a political scientist, and the author of the book Rampage Nation about mass shootings in the United States. Lou presented evidence for how the issues of gun violence and terrorism have begun to intersect.
Lou: After 9/11, I wanted to look at like, you know, what's happening in terms of domestic terrorism in the United States. And so I ended up doing a project where I studied all the attacks, all, like, every single attack on American soil from 2002 through 2015. All but two of the terrorist attacks that were lethal attacks involved firearms. They were perpetrated by firearms. And during that timeframe, there were 86 fatalities, and of those 86 fatalities, 82 came out of the barrel of a gun. So that's 95% roughly, of you know, the fatalities committed by terrorists on American soil post 9/11 were perpetrated by someone using a firearm.
Sonali: Lou developed a concept called the Trinity of Violence to understand violent threats and to explain how governments and other institutions try to prevent them.
Lou: The idea of the Trinity of Violence is that all acts of violence involve three elements: a perpetrator, a weapon, and a target. And if you could take away one of those elements, you're really, you know, you're, you're, you're basically making it not impossible, but near impossible to have an act of violence. Think about the perpetrator, the weapon and the target this way. The perpetrator is akin to intention. There's someone out there and they have the intention to do harm. The, the weapon is the capability, and the targets is the objective. There's a reason we're striking that target. Right. There's a, there's, there's a purpose behind it. So if you could do something to either, affect the perpetrator's intention, basically, you know, shut down or deny the weapons capability, or, you know, make it such that you can't hit that target and achieve your objective, one of those three, you kind of foil the plot.
Sonali: Lou argues that firearms have become the means of choice for terrorist attacks in the United States because they are the deadliest tool that is most easily accessible to those who wish to do harm. This is in part because of the government's efforts to deny other means of attack to potential terrorists.
Lou: Leaving firearms aside, right. Leaving gun violence aside. One thing we can learn is that the United States government's pretty good at responding to threats. We may not always get it right in terms of, you know, preventing things the first time around. But we're pretty good about, you know, once we get hit pretty bad how to respond. What happened after 9/11 was drastic, right? I mean, we went from, pretty much lax security, you know, you could bring knives on planes. I didn't know that until like 9/11, but you know, you could bring sharp objects onto planes. We went to, we went from that to you can't bring the water on a plane. Right. And, and, and what are we talking about there? If you think about it, go back to that Trinity of violence. What we're really talking about is capability. We made it so you couldn't have that capability, at least with regards to that target. The reason we did that is because it worked in other instances prior to that. Let me give you just one more example from security studies. You know what happened after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing? The Oklahoma City bombing is really simple. A guy fills a rental truck up with fertilizer, but that fertilizer has a certain level of ammonium nitrate in it. And it becomes, you know, basically explosive if you, you know, detonate it. So what did we do after that? We begin to regulate the levels of ammonium nitrate. Now, if you fill up, you know, a truck with fertilizer, you, you're not going to make an explosive device out of that, or certainly not a powerful explosive device out of that.
Sonali: The Trinity of Violence framework suggests three options for preventing deadly attacks, dissuading the perpetrator. Denying the weapon or defending the target. Lou says that denial of the weapon has been the preferred choice of governments to prevent attacks, including the United States. Identifying and dissuading perpetrators is very difficult and protecting the target, for example, with guards or barricades is a last resort for specific targets.
Lou: The denial is a more effective strategy. It's what works with explosions. It's what works with aviation terrorism. And it's what could work with gun violence, but, [brief laugh] it hasn't happened. We don't apply the Trinity of Violence the way we applied it toward, you know, explosions or aviation terrorism, we don't apply it that way to gun violence. And as a result, the gun violence problem really hasn't gone away. In fact, some people will tell you it's getting worse. It's certainly getting worse in terms of mass shootings.
Sonali: Focusing on terrorism, one of the trends that's getting worse is mass shootings by white supremacist extremists.
Lou: There was this shift that happened in 2009. And in 2009, there was a reaction in this country where all of a sudden, right-wing terrorism started to rise, and rise, you know, at a pretty, at a pretty steep angle. And, if you look at what's happening now, a lot of the terrorism that is a threat to the United States, not, this isn't me saying this. This is actually, you know, the FBI saying this, the department of Homeland security saying this, you know, they have finally come around to acknowledge that the biggest terrorism threat is right-wing terrorism, and in particular, white supremacist terrorism.
Sonali: We talked with Colin Clark, a Senior Research Fellow at the Soufan Center and an expert on terrorism, to learn more about the threat of terrorism from white supremacist extremists.
Colin: Right now I'd say that the most kind of pernicious threat to the Homeland is from, if you want to call them lone wolves, but like affiliated or inspired by violent white supremacy. You know, I'm talking to you from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where we had the Tree of Life Synagogue attack. We've had the El Paso attack and numerous other attacks, including many of which have been foiled. That's. We don't talk about the dogs that don't bark as much, but there's often a very fine line between, you know, someone going to jail and, you know, and averting catastrophe and an attack that would have really kind of convulsed the nation.
Sonali: We asked Colin what white supremacist extremism is an is and how it connects with the broader issue of gun violence in the United States.
Colin: Yeah. So I think it's an individual or a group that believes in establishing a white ethno state and that views anyone that's not white, you know, whether, you know, any form of minority, you know, the frequent targets are, Jewish people, African Americans, but, but not only, you know, as lesser-than. Right, so it's about establishing supremacy, hence the name. The ideology, and the propaganda talks a lot about purity, superiority and things like that. You may be familiar with this term accelerationism, which a lot of these groups subscribe to, which is, it's a concept of bringing about, you know, the end of the world, almos,t the end of governments and being born anew in this destruction. So before they can build this white ethno state, they need to tear down the existing system, by any means necessary, which means violence. Right, and, and a big part of that is through the gun culture. And a lot of these videos feature them training using firearms, brandishing weapons, et cetera, and, and as a form of kind of intimidation. Because remember, a huge component of terrorism is psychological. The violence is important, but it's the intimidation and coercion that goes into it, that, that is also, you know, we can't forget.
Sonali: One person working at the intersection of gun violence and white supremacist extremism is my own sister Anajana Rajan. She was recently a fellow at the Aspen Institute where she developed a tool to try to help identify potentially violent white supremacist extremists, to try to intervene before they attack. Before she went to Aspen, Anjana was the chief technology officer of a nonprofit called Callisto that used cryptography to address the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. Callisto found that people hesitated to come forward to report sexual assault for a variety of reasons, including doubt about how to define their experience, loyalty to the perpetrator and worries about their anonymity. But they found if people knew they were not the only survivor, they would be much more likely to come forward. Callisto addressed this problem by building what's called an information escrow, a service where one person could report their assault and the information would only be unlocked if a second person came forward. We asked Angelina how she thought a tool that used an information escrow could be applied to prevent violence by white supremacist extremists.
Anjana: So, through my research, I stumbled upon, a study, a gun violence study conducted by the FBI that looked at the pre attack behaviors of active shooters between the year 2000 and the year 2013. And one of the most interesting insights from that study was that each perpetrator on average had three distinct bystanders who observed concerning behaviors. And some of these behaviors were quite severe, including something that the FBI describes as leakage, which basically means that the killer has explicitly communicated an intention to cause mass harm. What was really fascinating was that unfortunately, nearly 60% of those bystanders did not report these observations to the police, which meant that an opportunity for intervention was missed and lives were lost. And so I started to look into why they didn't report and it started to look very familiar to me. The reasons that the bystanders didn't report included distrusted the police, loyalty to the perpetrator, the self doubt of their own assessment, a desire to remain anonymous. And at that point I just got excited because this phenomenon around low bystander reporting looked a lot like what I saw in the sexual assault space. When we think, when I think about the concept of an information escrow, what really excites me about this technology is it holds space for the nuance of this problem. On one hand, you want to be able to identify high risk violence. On the other hand you want to protect the civil liberties and enable due process for those who are accused. Because the consequences of not doing that creates another form of injustice. If you are one person and all you've seen as one symptom and it doesn't unlock the escrow, that is locked and safe and nobody can see it. Not, not the police, not the company. Nobody can see it. But let's say a second person comes in and says, not only have I seen this behavior, but I've seen a second or a third behavior, then we're starting to aggregate these behaviors across multiple bystanders. And only when there's a significant risk, then we're seeing the escrow unlock. And at that point, each bystander is then connected with an attorney who can help them navigate all the reporting options. The reporting options might be, I want to file a gun violence restraining order, and I want to make sure this person's weapon is removed from their possession. Another alternative might be, hey, my, my child has been radicalized by an extremist group and I want to, I want social services, that can help me, rehabilitate this person or reduce threat.
Sonali: Anjana sees the overlap between white supremacist extremism and domestic violence as one way an information escrow could be applied safely by putting it in the hands of domestic violence survivors and counselors and related qualified practitioners.
Anjana: There's kind of two key criteria for me, that I think need to be met before you can access a tool like this. It should not just be anyone can, you know, access it. Two criteria is, is there a demonstrated, is there a, is there a demonstration of hateful ideology and is there a demonstrated act of violence? You could argue that if some person is calling a domestic violence hotline or going to a domestic violence shelter, both of those criteria have been met, particularly if the victim is a woman and the perpetrator is a man. Because if it is that case, then you could argue that the hateful ideology at play is misogyny. And by definition, if you're calling the hotline or calling, going to shelter, it means that the violence has become untenable for the victim.
Sonali: Colin tells us more about how misogyny runs through many hateful ideologies, including white supremacy.
Colin: There is a common connective tissue and that connective tissue is misogyny. Right, so white supremacist extremists, the way that they look at the world, even though there are women in the movement, you know, the, the subtle way to put it forward would be traditional roles, traditional values. But really what they're saying is that feminism is a significant cause of the world's ills, that women who are educated and pursue careers are having babies later in life or not at all, and that's detrimental to the white race. Because the population is declining. And that's how they kind of frame this. And they try to do it in a way that makes them sound like a pseudo intellectual. You know, which is not the case, or it is, you know, they're, they're, I wouldn't even call them pseudo intellectuals. Right? These people are, this is dime store, you know, psychology here. So there's a lot of overlap between incels or involuntary celibates and white supremacists. And that connection is through misogyny and the way that they view women and themselves and their place in the world.
Sonali: Anjana, like anyone trying to protect sensitive data related to public safety must contend with the balance between civil liberties and identifying threats to communities.
Anjana: What makes this problem hard is how we define civil liberties isn't clear. It's, it's not obvious and people are constitutional scholars who spend their entire lives debating and understanding this problem. There are people who would look at what I'm doing and rightfully say, well, it is the First Amendment right for a white supremacist terrorist to be able to say whatever they want, no matter how hateful and odious it is. And it is my role to protect that right even if I don't agree with what they have to say. You could also argue that it is my First Amendment right to freedom of religion. And so what about my First Amendment right to go to my church or my temple or my synagogue or my mosque and practice my religion without being shot up by a gunman? So even as we think about the First Amendment, it is not clear, which virtue is more important as we interpret that. And that's what makes this really hard. And so, I want to be careful not to oversimplify the civil liberties problem, because it is not clear and it, it never will be.
Sonali: Anjana's plan to create an information escrow tool for identifying potential white supremacist extremist terrorists is still a proposal and has not been put into place. We talked with Collin about other approaches to combating white supremacist extremist terrorism in the United States, including possible legislation.
Colin: We don't have domestic terrorism laws. So there's only so much you can do against individuals that operate here on U.S. soil. I think that's likely changing. I think we're getting kind of, to a point where people are considering that laws do need to be implemented and, and changed, and we need to do a kind of wholesale reassessment of the way that we think about, the whole concept of domestic terrorism. But you know, it's almost like the Al Capone stuff where you're looking to get them for other things except terrorism, right? So material support, and issues like that.
Sonali: But, as Colin points out, there are significant civil liberty concerns with potential domestic terrorism legislation.
Colin: Yeah. I would be concerned about the politicization of this, right? So any group that expresses opposition to the incumbent or whoever's in office, right? Do they become a terrorist group? You know what, where is the line? And I think that's one of the reasons why we haven't gone down that road yet, because it is so fraught with land mines, so to speak, and we haven't thought through fully, I think the nuances involved. You know, I think especially given the current context and the way that politics colors everything we do, and we're in an environment that's so polarized and, and partisan and likely will be for the foreseeable future. So, you know, as a researcher, this is a bit of a cop out, but I would say, you know, we need more research. You know, we need more debate and more kind of, you know, policy analysis surrounding this topic.
Sonali: Lou believes this polarized political climate is one reason we treat guns differently than any other means terrorists use in the United States.
Lou: You know, in terms of guns, there is a diehard core part of American society that for them, this is a very, this may be the most important political issue to them. They don't see it in terms of the perspective of, you know, the security threat. For them, this is about individual liberties, individual freedoms, you know, rights. That they have a right to bear arms, and that's the cost of freedom. So we have this kind of gridlock, right? On the one side, you have people who are willing to implement kind of the lessons of the Trinity of Violence that we've applied toward explosives and aviation security. And then on the other hand, you have other people who are like, no, you know what, the constitutional issue is just, I can't get over.
Sonali: Do you think that if we kind of collectively reframed gun violence as a security issue as a terror, terrorism issue. If we did that more effectively, sort of rebranding the issue, so to speak, would that change the way in which people think about its prevention? Do you think that that is part of the problem?
Lou: So, [laughing] That's a good question. I would have told you, probably 5 to 10 years ago that if you could reframe gun violence as a security issue, you might get a lot of movement, from the gun rights crowd. They would move the needle a little bit and be more open to, basically accepting gun safety, at least certain kind of safety measures that have seemed to die so far in Congress. But that would have been 5 or 10 years ago. You know, the, the Democrats tried to pass a couple years ago, a bill that would have made it, that would have put a prohibition on people who are on the terrorism watch list. That would have prohibited them from buying firearms. Okay. Think about that. There are people who are on a watch list who are suspected of being terrorists, who can't get on a plane, but when it came time to prevent people on the terrorism watch list from buying a gun? No. There was like a you know, whoop, hold up right there. No, we're not going to pass that legislation, so that, that got killed. And I thought that something that would have affected only a very small portion of the population and really put security above guns in this issue, in this instance, that that would have passed. And it didn't.
Sonali: We talked with Lou about how we might move forward if this ideology is so deeply rooted for some portion of our country that providing different kinds of evidence or reframing the issue is simply not convincing.
Lou: In the end, I think the only way, the only way you're going to get any kind of legislation passed is through the exercise of raw power. You know, you're going to need to basically put. If you, if you feel strongly about getting gun control legislation passed, you're going to need to, you know,
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Lou: vote for those parties that are promising to implement those measures. So you're going to need, if we're going to talk about gun control, you're going to need a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and you know, possibly a Democratic President. Ideally a Democratic President.
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Sonali: This episode was produced by Sonali Rajan, Lalitha Vasudevan, Joe Riina-Ferrie and Azsaneé Truss. It was edited by Joe Riina-Ferrie with the help of the (Re)search for Solutions team. Our music is Research Area by Poitr Pachyna, and can be found on shockwave-sound.com. You can find us online at researchforsolutions.com. And you can listen to our next episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Play. Please subscribe, rate and review. We'll be back soon.
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