After the two men who carried out stateside terror attacks on New Year’s Day were revealed to be veterans of the “war on terror”, public scrutiny about the role of American servicemen in such incidents came into focus.
The New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was a 13-year veteran of the US army, while the Las Vegas suicide bomber was an active-duty Green Beret.
Since, media and academia have rightly pointed out the correlations between active duty and former servicemen in acts of extremist violence: they are statistically the most likely demographic to be a “mass casualty offender”. A no more obvious example is the January 6 attack in 2021, which saw at least 230 people with US military backgrounds storm the Capitol.
Read the rest of the story at The Guardian.