San Diego shooting shows disturbing trend of shooters copying acts of violence

Experts say hate-motivated extremists being radicalized online and adopting ideologies of shooters before them The killing of three men at a San Diego mosque on Monday is the latest example of a disturbing trend in recent decades: hate-motivated shooters learning from – and copying – each other in acts of violence meant to push the nation toward a race war and, ultimately, societal collapse. The two San Diego shooters, who were 17 and 18, killed 51-year-old Amin Abdullah, a security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, 78-year-old Mansour Kaziha, a mosque elder and founding member of the center, and Nadir Awad, 57, who lived across the street and whose wife worked as a teacher at the center’s school. The shooters later died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The pair appears to have been deeply entrenched in online extremist networks and looked up to shooters who have killed dozens of people in US places of worship, schools and grocery stores. In a 75-page document the shooters wrote before Monday’s attack, they expressed hatred for Muslim and Jewish people, for Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and for both political parties in the US. In addition to the document spel