The forever war continues under Trump, with the renewed U.S. bombing of ISIS-inspired Al Qaeda (Al Shabaab) militants in Somalia (“smoking them out in their caves).”
—Editor, WAMM Newsletter

Image from a shooter video game

Mass Killings Migrate Home                                                       

by Coleen Rowley, Women Against Military Madness Newsletter,
Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 2025

When will we admit that the epidemic of mass shootings and other mass violence constantly erupting all over the U.S. is the direct result (aka “blowback”) from the U.S. and its proxy “forever war”?  How long can such horrendous facts speak for themselves yet be studiously avoided?

The U.S. has been waging a series of inherently illegal wars of choice to gain full-spectrum unipolar dominance over the rest of the world.  Yet we hear nightly newscasters — desperate to obfuscate and normalize the unprecedented, steep increase in violence — always end their reporting from each horrifically senseless mass murder scene at a school, concert, church, market, workplace, or other public gathering in “the homeland” with the ridiculous comment: “authorities are searching for a motive” as if they’re all Agatha Christie murder mysteries.

People of a certain age may recall, however, that this war blowback was once common knowledge. After 9-11, I gave talks listing the three most egregious incidents back then of imperialist militarism’s “cost of war” coming home. They took the form of “domestic terrorism” as in: Army veterans’ Terry Nichols and (decorated) Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building that killed 167; former (equally decorated) Army Sergeant “DC Sniper” John Muhammad’s serial killer type murders of 17 people; and fellow Gulf War veteran Robert Flores Jr.’s spree shootings in Arizona of his three nursing professors. Even though it probably fell on deaf ears, at that time I was able to, at least publicly, warn that our country’s choosing to launch war on Iraq would also doom itself to a significant increase in violence inside the U.S.

It would take nearly 15 more years after America’s long-planned “perpetual war” was fully underway for someone as multi-credentialed as Anthropology/Sociology Professor Hugh Gusterson to publish, in 2016, “Understanding Mass Killings: A disproportionate number of mass killings in the U.S. have been committed by military veterans. We should be asking ourselves why.” [1]

He importantly noted:

…rarely do we focus on military service as a shared attribute among mass killers. Maybe this is, like inadequate Veterans Affairs health care, just another way in which we ignore soldiers and their problems once their service is done. Or maybe it is because rampaging veterans do not fit with our preferred narratives of soldiers as self-sacrificing heroes and of military service as a route to what the historian Richard Slotkin called “regeneration through violence.” [Meaning society can renew itself through violence.] In any case, although many mass killers have, of course, not been veterans, we need to ask ourselves why a disproportionate number have been.

George W. Bush once said that he took the U.S. to war in Iraq so that we could fight “over there” and not at home. It is an attractive fantasy that, by using the military to intervene in the Middle East, we can corral the violence there. But we are learning that a connected world does not work that way. Intervention “over there” generates terrorist attacks by angry Muslims in the capitals of Europe and in nightclubs and office buildings in the U.S. And the soldiers we send “over there,” to the land of violence, bring the war back with them. Many of our mass killings at home are a haunted shadow of our interventions abroad. We need to probe that shadow more deeply.”

Naturally, readers of The New York Times pilloried Prof. Gusterson for debunking America’s commonly held “attractive fantasies,” which prevent discussion of why a disproportionate number of mass killings in the U.S. are committed by military veterans (forcing the professor to further defend his essay). [2]

At about the same time, David Swanson, executive director of World Beyond War[3] undertook meticulous review of public news accounts regarding all the burgeoning mass shootings in the country to try and determine a more exact proportional correlation between military service and our epidemic of mass violence.  It wasn’t easy research, because for a long time mainstream media often omitted the perpetrators’ military backgrounds as irrelevant.  Over several years, however, Swanson found that somewhere between 31 percent and 36 percent of all mass shooters are trained by the U.S. military (a figure later confirmed by other sources, such as the Violence Project).[4] The actual proportion would likely be even higher given the information gaps that exist in news accounts; a stricter definition of “mass shootings” which requires at least four innocent victims, aside from the shooter, to be killed (not just wounded); and the expansion from shooting with guns to the use of other lethal weapons like trucks/cars, knives, and bombs – an example of the last category reported here:

The primary suspects in two deadly attacks on New Year’s Day shared a history of service in the U.S. military, underscoring persistent fears over extremism within the armed services that officials have struggled to uproot.  The suspect behind a truck rampage in New Orleans that killed 14 people, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was an Army veteran, while the man allegedly behind the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the international Trump hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, was an active-duty service member in the Army.
— “New Year’s attacks fuel fears of extremism in military,” The Hill, January 2, 2025

It’s therefore not hard to understand the bit of exasperation that comes through in Swanson’s most recent and insightful “Military IS the Extremism” following the New Years Eve attacks described above.  In his article, Swanson writes:

According to a headline in The Hill report, which takes a position typical of U.S. corporate media: “New Year’s attacks fuel fears of extremism in military.” In other words, an institution openly dedicated to mass killing and destruction may have fallen victim to infiltration by ‘extremists’.” He goes on to remark, “As if there could be something more extreme than a military.”

Swanson attempts to point out all the compartmentalization (unadulterated hypocrisy!) put out by the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank (MICIMATT)[5] “influencers” to keep U.S. citizens from knowing the truth — that the wars our leaders have launched, entailing the (rather wanton) killing of millions of people[6] in foreign countries and the unprecedentedly steep increase in mass killing on U.S. soil are not merely “correlation” but direct causation.

I can go a step further than David Swanson as to why this is so. Actually the reason why is even worse than the fact that 30 percent plus of mass killers have been physically trained by the U.S. military, resulting in the horrible bloody “blowback” suffered by so many U.S. victims. An even greater number of domestic mass killers seem to subconsciously aspire to be seen as war heroes. From my prior career in the FBI undergoing regular significant gun training as well as my experience interviewing murderers, I’ve concluded that desensitization to killing is the most significant factor.

Such desensitization can occur in many ways, essentially learned or acquired from one’s immediate environment — for example, it’s how younger members join a criminal gang aspiring to become as ruthlessly violent as the gang leaders they look up to and whose wealth/power they hope to someday possess.

Nearly all murderers seek to protect their own psyches with ego defense rationalizations that normalize their actions.  This extends to and permeates the entire militaristic culture in the U.S. with its ever-increasing glorification of its military and virtuous wars fought for noble causes.  Amplifying it is Hollywood’s sensational plethora of American Sniper/Top Gun/Zero Dark Thirty type worship of blood-drenched war “heroes,” and Call of Duty type video war games that teach school children to “kill or be killed.” (Videos, in particular, serve the purpose of facilitating “all volunteer” military recruitment.) Militarism is literally in the air we breathe.

In a myriad of ways, Americans as a whole — far more than the small percentage who go on to join the actual military — have now been indoctrinated to believe in “regenerative violence.” It should therefore come as no surprise that, having been surrounded for decades with this form of death culture, more and more of our fellow citizens eventually fall into the pit of despair/depression, and come to think that suicidal-homicidal violence — aka “war” IS the answer — to their own personal problems. Instead of looking for “motives” for these senseless violent rampages erupting on a near daily basis throughout our country, we need to understand, not cover up, the root causes.

[1] Gusterston, Hugh. Understanding Mass Killings. Sapiens. sapiens.org. July 18, 2016. tinyurl.com/27xywb77

[2] Veterans and Mass Shootings. Opinion., New York Times. July 22, 2016. tinyurl.com/ms2rdsce

[3] worldbeyondwar.org

[4] Swanson, David. At Least 36% of Mass Shooters Have Been Trained by the U.S. Military. Counterpunch. March 3, 2024, tinyurl.com/5bd3f5p6; At Least 31% of Mass Shooters Were Trained to Shoot by the U.S. Military. Progressive Hub. October 26, 2023. tinyurl.com/4up5femy

[5] Prolewiki.en.prolewiki.org/wiki/MICIMATT

[6] Some reports say U.S. wars are responsible for over five million civilian deaths and counting since 9/11.

Coleen Rowley became a 9/11 whistleblower while chief division counsel of the FBI Minneapolis field office. A committed antiwar activist in the years that followed, she is a member of Women Against Military Madness, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the Eisenhower Media Network.

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The opinions expressed in Wings of Change may or may not be the opinions of the editor.

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