https://www.npr.org/2025/03/08/nx-s1-5321082/school-shootings-radicalizationby Odette Yousef
March 8, 2025
Two recent school shootings are highlighting what extremism researchers see as a growing — and poorly understood — trend among young people who embrace mass violence.
The attacks, at high schools in Madison, Wis., and Nashville, Tenn., defy categories that law enforcement and researchers have long used to understand radicalization pathways, such as radical Islamist terrorism and white nationalist terrorism. Instead, some researchers say these attacks are examples of "nonideological" terrorism. They say these attacks appear to be the result of several antisocial, decentralized, online networks coming together in ways that encourage and inspire younger children to commit atrocities.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, shared-interest groups of people who obsess over mass killings have developed across social media platforms. Known as the True Crime Community (TCC), participants delve into detail about perpetrators' backgrounds and how they carried out attacks. Sometimes users share fan fiction inspired by true-life shootings.
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Zoschak and other analysts believe the shift reflects the blurring of lines between the TCC and other, darker online communities that has accelerated in recent years. Among them is the Terrorgram Collective, a terroristic, neo-fascist network that encourages violence to bring about societal collapse. Also, a subculture referred to as Saints Culture, which venerates mass killers as almost superhuman figures, frames high-casualty attacks as the ultimate and only legacy worth emulating. Other online movements, such as No Lives Matter, promote nihilism as justification for violence.
Experts say the result of this melding of communities has been a change in the profile of individuals mobilized to mass violence. "Young Black men, for instance," said Kriner, noting Henderson's background. "This is not something we've seen in the trend of school shooters(...)"
Zoschak says it has also widened the reach of violent ideological movements to women. "TCC has perhaps the best gender balance of any extremist community I've seen online," he said. "It is roughly 50/50."
"We've seen that they've been connected to kind of nihilistic, accelerationism, misanthropic stuff," he said. "They've been connected to some occult groups, and they've been connected to neo-Nazism. But at the heart of it, it truly seems to be misanthropy and nihilism."
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