This brief publication summarizes an investigation of the overlap of suicidality and lethality in the Domestic Terrorism Offender Level Database, to determine whether domestic terrorism attacks may also be crimes of despair.
The authors of this paper utilized data from the Domestic Terrorism Offender Level Database (DTOLD) in order to determine whether domestic terrorism attacks may also be crimes of despair. DTOLD captures publicly available information, such as media reports and court records, on the life histories of 320 individuals who carried out non-Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2020. The authors discuss their findings and implications from their research, laying out some specific details about their core findings regarding domestic terrorists: 11.6 percent (27 individuals) had a history of suicidal ideation; 3.1 percent (10 individuals) had previously attempted suicide; 10 percent (37 individuals) of the domestic terrorist offenders in DTOLD intended to die in their attack, with 7.2 percent able to be considered “suicide terrorists” since they intended to die by suicide in their attack and 3.1 percent intending to die in their attack; and 3.4 percent of the domestic terrorists in DTOLD died by suicide during, or immediately after, their attack. While the authors discuss the implications of their findings, they also note that the sample size for their analysis was too small to support conclusions about the population.