US shooter’s Facebook rant
– The most worrying thing about James Hodgkinson, experts on violent extremism say, is how unremarkable the 66-year-old home inspector from Illinois seemed until he opened fire on Republican lawmakers as they played baseball.
Violent clashes between leftand right-wing groups at rallies and protests around the country have increased since the election of President Donald Trump.
Experts say detecting and heading off antigovernment attacks from people driven by political ideology is difficult because of the abundance of partisan rancour, particularly on social media.
Hodgkinson wrote a series of strident messages against Trump on his Facebook account. But so have many other Americans, particularly since the divisive 2016 presidential election campaign.
None of Hodgkinson’s posts suggested he would end up opening fire at a baseball field outside Washington on Wednesday. He wounded a top Republican lawmaker, a Congressional aide, a lobbyist, and a Capitol police officer before being shot himself. He later died from his wounds.
In one Facebook post, Hodgkinson wrote: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
However, there is no evidence so far that he was linked to any radical or violent groups. Like millions of other Americans, he supported Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who condemns violence.
Steve Bongardt, who worked until 2015 as an FBI special agent focusing on threat detection, said traditional counterterrorism tools such as behavioural profiling and surveillance are less effective because so many otherwise harmless people post virulent messages on social media.
“The problem isn’t that behavioural profiles don’t work. The problem is the utility of them, because they give us so many false positives,” said Bongardt.
Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow in the Anti-Defamation League’s Centre on Extremism, said the intensity of emotions on both sides of the political divide could be dangerous.
“When you have people with mainstream opinions so worked up that they’re willing to commit acts of violence, it illustrates in a stark way how divided our country is right now,” he said.