WASHINGTON — (WASHINGTON) -- A Hispanic man accused of shooting and killing eight people at an outlet mall in Texas earlier this month held a mix of views consistent with neo-Nazism and involuntary celibate extremist ideologies, authorities said.
Though a motive for the suspect, who was shot and killed by a police officer, remains under investigation, the mass shooting appears among recent examples that highlight a"persistent and lethal threat" to U.S. security posed by"lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances," the Department of Homeland Security said in a recent bulletin.
"Traditionally, terrorism is thought of as being largely nested within a single ideology," Gartenstein-Ross told ABC News."What we're seeing is violent extremists who display an amalgamation of different disparate beliefs, interests and grievances." John Cohen, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security acting undersecretary for intelligence and ABC News contributor, points to several factors that are contributing to this phenomenon in the U.S., including a highly-polarized society in which some people feel that violence is acceptable, and an online and media environment that is"saturated" with extremist content.
"We as a people are becoming more incoherent," he said."Extremists are becoming more incoherent as well." Composite violent extremism poses several challenges to law enforcement, Gartenstein-Ross noted, from determining when someone who is ideologically idiosyncratic becomes a threat to how to best intervene, to how to define their community.
"I firmly believe these are things we can crack," he continued."A lot of these are new questions based on the increased prominence of idiosyncratic radicalization patterns.""We have to employ not just traditional law enforcement strategies to address it, but also community-based threat management strategies that involve collaborative efforts involving mental health professionals, law enforcement, community groups, faith leaders," he said.
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