Suicidality Among Domestic Terrorists

Despite the focus on suicide terrorism over the past 20 years—particularly by media outlets, policy-makers, and academics—scholarship regarding suicidality in domestic terrorism remains sparse. The post-9/11 research related to suicidality in terrorism has largely focused on the suicide terrorism of Islamist extremists. The research that touches on domestic terrorism, however, is both limited and inconclusive. Lankford, for example, has argued that suicidality is one of three key similarities between perpetrators of suicide terrorism and perpetrators of mass shootings. But a 2017 article by Freilich et al., whose research focused on far-right and jihadi attacks in the US, found that suicide attackers were no more likely than non-suicide attackers to have previously attempted suicide.

By contrast, suicidality among those who carry out public shootings is well documented. Jillian Peterson and James Densley, leveraging The Violence Prevention Project’s (TVPP’s) Mass Shooter Database, found that 70 percent of the 197 individuals who committed mass shootings over the past 60 years either had a history of suicidality or intended to die carrying out their attack. Retrospective research by the US Secret Service on school shooters from 1974 to 2000 found that at least 78 percent had experienced suicidal thoughts or engaged in suicidal behavior before their attack. And an analysis leveraging the Columbia Mass Murder Database found that nearly half of all mass shooters died by suicide at the scene of their attack. Mass shootings, as Peterson and Densley have noted, may in fact be “crimes of despair.”

We leveraged a new dataset—the Domestic Terrorism Offender Level Database (DTOLD)—to explore whether domestic terrorism attacks may also be crimes of despair. The database captures publicly available information (e.g., media reporting, court records) on the life histories of 320 individuals who carried out a non-Islamist terrorist attack in the United States between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2020.

Our data suggest that domestic terrorists in general may be more suicidal than the general population but significantly less suicidal than mass shooters except when domestic terrorists kill four or more people (notably, four is the number of deaths required for a shooting to meet the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s definition of a mass shooting).

DTOLD contains three variables relevant to the question of suicidality: history of suicidality (including suicide attempts and suicidal ideation), intention to die while committing a terrorist attack, and death by suicide during or immediately after a terrorist attack.

Collecting data on suicidality is difficult, but 19.3 percent (62) of the individuals in DTOLD have been coded positively for at least one of the three indicators of suicidality. This rate is notably higher than the rate calculated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is 4.37 percent for men (89 percent of those in DTOLD are men). This rate is still lower, however, than TVPP’s rate of 70 percent among mass shooters.