So, American Mass Shooters and Islamic Terrorists Do Have Something in Common - Defense One: When US president Donald Trump announced his so-called “Muslim ban” on Jan. 27, he framed it as a move to keep the country safe from terrorists. But a look at the data on terrorist attacks in the US exposes the fallacy of this logic. An immigration ban will not keep the terrorists out. The terrorists are already here.
According to a publicly available dataset from the New America Foundation, in the years since 9/11, jihadists born in the US have killed 69 victims. Right-wing extremists born in the US have murdered 50 victims. Foreign-born jihadists are the least lethal of these groups, with a total of 25 victims.
These numbers offer evidence that an immigration ban will not stop the murder of Americans. But they also point to a larger flaw in the way we talk about domestic terrorism in the US. We treat right-wing extremists and radical Islamic killers as if they are two separate issues. But in fact, research suggests that the same underlying factors cause homegrown Americans to break bad—whether they join a radical Islamic terrorism group or the Ku Klux Klan.
