From the 1950s up until 2016, the U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in Lone Wolf attacks. A lone-wolf terrorist is someone who prepares and commits violent acts alone, outside of any command structure and without material assistance from any group. In 2010, Leon Pancetta, who was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), stated that lone wolf attacks could pose “the main threat to this country”(Worth, 2016). This statement can be proven correct even seven years later. It is much harder to track the ideals of someone who is independent from any group and lacking structure. President Obama stated in 2011, “When you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder …show more content…
To take the data a step further, from 2010 to 2016, there were 36 attacks that resulted in the death of 118 people. Although it is nearly impossible to accurately determine whether these attacks were free from foreign influence, research suggest that the majority of them fall into the category of domestic terrorism. Most of the time the offender is killed during their attack which makes getting a clear and concise intelligence report on their ideological motivations more difficult (Charress, 2016). These random attacks are becoming much more frequent making it hard for most Americans to live in peace while worrying about when and where the next one will …show more content…
Long felt as though black people were being bullied and the only way to respond was to use brute force. To him, the police were oppressors. Gavin stated, “I just wanted to let y'all know, don't affiliate me with nothing” (Allen, 2016). This was his way of saying he acted on his own without any outside influence. Both Johnson and Long were killed in shootouts with the police which makes it hard to determine definitively the true motivations behind the attacks. They are both accused of being part of black supremacist groups. These kinds of attacks fall in line with left-wing domestic terrorist, who have a history of stirring up violence against the