Why Terrorists Kill: the Striking Similarities Between the New Zealand and Pulse Nightclub Shooters

Peter Bergen wrote for CNN analyzing the shooters of the New Zealand and Pulse night club attacks.

The decision to kill innocent civilians who are strangers -- whether you are a jihadist terrorist or a white nationalist militant -- can never be easily explained, but there does seem to be a common profile for "lone actor" Western terrorists today, irrespective of their ideology.

First, they are radicalizing because of what they read online. ISIS created a vast global library of propaganda that influenced terrorists such as Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. Mateen never met with anyone in ISIS and never traveled to Iraq or Syria where ISIS was headquartered. His radicalization was entirely driven by what he viewed on the internet.

Similarly, Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who allegedly carried out the New Zealand attacks, killing 50 people, tapped into a large library of white nationalist material from around the world on the internet, according to the document that Tarrant posted about his motivations for the attacks.