Three men are dead in San Diego after a shooting at an Islamic Center on Monday, killed by two teenage gunmen who later took their own lives. The attack fits a chilling pattern that has emerged over recent decades: shooters radicalized in online extremist spaces who study, admire, and replicate the tactics of mass killers who came before them.
The two shooters, ages 17 and 18, killed Amin Abdullah, a 51-year-old security guard, Mansour Kaziha, a 78-year-old mosque elder and founding member, and Nadir Awad, 57, who lived nearby. The pair had authored a 75-page manifesto spelling out hatred for Muslims, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and both major political parties.
What investigators found most telling were the signatures of online radicalization. The shooters livestreamed their violence. They wrote on their weapons with white marker. These are hallmarks of attackers shaped by digital extremist networks, according to Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, which has been analyzing the pair's digital footprint.
"Preliminarily, we're seeing two individuals who jointly radicalized into this digital space and then jointly radicalized into this moment of violence," Kriner said.
The San Diego shooters repeatedly referenced Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. This connection underscores a broader pattern: many mass shooters are not bound by traditional political ideology. Instead, they adopt the worldviews and methods of shooters they venerate, creating a chain of violence that crosses borders and years.
The chain runs deep. The gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 was inspired by the Columbine shooters. A German mass shooter in 2016 kept a book about Virginia Tech and Columbine in his bedroom. The Buffalo supermarket shooter in 2022 idolized the Christchurch attacker and drew inspiration from massacres in El Paso and Charleston. A gunman at a Minneapolis school last August expressed admiration for the Nashville school shooter who killed six people two years prior.
Experts warn of a growing threat called nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), described by federal authorities as violence driven by hatred of society itself and a desire to collapse it through chaos. The FBI revealed in February that it is investigating at least 350 people believed connected to NVE networks across the country. These networks exploit vulnerable young people through threats, blackmail, and manipulation to push them toward terrorism and violence.
In March, federal authorities issued warnings that such groups continue using digital platforms to radicalize children. The White House released a counter-terrorism strategy this month, though notably it omitted any mention of white supremacist violence or online radicalization of youth, despite federal officials previously acknowledging these networks as serious threats.
Vice President JD Vance called the San Diego shooting "reprehensible" on Tuesday, describing it as "one of the most anti-Christian things and anti-American things that you could do."
Kriner notes that the ideology binding these shooters is less about conventional politics and more about a shared nihilism. Many embrace a hybrid worldview mixing fascist ideals with the conviction that society has deteriorated so far that only violent action matters.
"The core belief of doing something, taking action, appeals across social, racial, economic and national lines," Kriner said. "It makes it hard for us to find the motivating factor because everything becomes a factor."
Author James Rodriguez: "The evidence is stark: radicalization pipelines online are manufacturing killers faster than law enforcement can identify them, and the copycat cycle shows no signs of breaking without serious intervention in digital spaces."
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