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Are you analyzing the list of "Notable Domestic Terrorist Attacks" on that page? Which has already been filtered by some criteria of notability?

A more complete list is actually prompted at the top of that section and is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat....

However, you've possibly read that already since you're 41% number appears to be sourced from that page and is specifically talking about deaths and not events from 9/11/2001 to 2017. That 41% is heavily influenced by the deadliest event which was the Orlando Shooting, and if you look at the overall picture, 73% of events were perpetrated by white supremacists.

Honestly, directly reading the GAO study and the other, more recent, studies is a lot more illuminating and illustrates the growing issue of white supremacy and far-right political violence.



The link you referenced[0] also includes this:

   A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative 
   Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US 
   between 2008 and 2016.[27] It found:[28]

   115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were 
   foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them 
   resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.
   
   63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents 
   were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of 
   them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.

   19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents 
   were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of 
   them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as 
   "plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused 
   7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[15]
So out of 197 incidents reported between 2008 and 2016, 58% were "Far Right" inspired, 32% were "Islamist" inspired and 10% were "Far left" inspired.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat...


Yeah, the GAO study was purely based on the U.S. Extremist Crime Database and that's clearly a limitation, although less of one than reading through a list of notable attacks on a wiki page. The page itself also is generally about terrorism, so it talks about both international and domestic throughout it which can be confusing. That's why I suggested looking at the actual studies linked to on the page, a lot of them do a better job of pointing out their time period and limitations than the brief overview on the page.

Also, the page only has pretty good resources up until like 2020, where it ends with a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies which reviews data up to May 2020, and DHS which reviews data from 2018-2019. The CSIS one is pretty good because it includes graphs of data over time and really shows the worrying increase across the board but the staggering increase of "right-wing" violence since the mid 2010s.

CSIS has a few more studies more recently it looks like. There's https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terro... from 2022, which shows that 49% of events were committed by far-right and 40% were far-left. However, the far-right were more likely to target people with guns and bombs and the far-left were more likely to target property with melee and incendiary weapons, so 28 of the 30 deaths were from the far-right while the far-left accounted for 1.

Then a few more years later, there's https://www.csis.org/analysis/rising-threat-anti-government-.... Which is more about the increase in "partisan political belief" based attacks, and then gives some examples instead of breaking it down further.

However, CSIS likewise uses their own database of attacks, and in between the other studies and the most recent one it appears they changed their methodology of what attacks were included to make it more strictly about an attempt or threat to kill (which would remove a lot of the property based attacks from the previous study), premeditation, and desire to strike fear broadly. I'd be interested in seeing a revisitation of their previous methods with their new datasets, or even to actually be able to see the dataset itself.




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