WORLD NEWS | US mass killings linked to extremism surge in past decade

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (AP) — The past decade has seen at least three times the number of extremism-related mass killings in the United States than in any 10-year period since the 1970s, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The report, provided to The Associated Press ahead of its public release on Thursday, also found that all of the extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to right-wing extremism, with a disproportionately high number linked to white supremacy.

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These include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 black shoppers dead, and a mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that left five dead.

“It is no exaggeration to say that we live in an era of extremist mass killing,” the group’s Center for Extremism report said.

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From the 1970s to the 2000s, there were between two and seven extremism-related mass killings per decade, but that number jumped to 21 in the 2010s, the report found.

The trend has continued since then, with five extremist mass killings in 2021 and 2022, the same number as in the first decade of the new millennium.

The number of victims has also increased. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in mass killings linked to ideological extremism, the report said.

That’s far more than in any decade except the 1990s, when a bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people.

Extremist killings are carried out by those associated with extremist movements and ideologies.

Several factors combined to drive this number up between 2010 and 2020. The rise of the Islamic State group has inspired the shootings, which have been followed by a handful of shootings against police officers and others linked to the growing violence driven by white supremacists, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior fellow at the ADL Center for Extremism explain.

The center tracks killings linked to various forms of extremism in the United States and compiles them into an annual report. It tracked 25 extremism-related killings last year, down from 33 the year before.

93% of killings in 2022 will be committed with firearms. The report also noted that no police officers were killed by extremists last year for the first time since 2011.

With the decline of the Islamic State group, the main near-term threat may be white supremacist shooters, the report found. Meanwhile, Oren Siegel, vice president of the Center on Extremism, said the rise in mass killing attempts is one of the most worrying trends in recent years.

“We cannot sit by and accept this as the new normal,” Siegel said. (Associated Press)

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