Three firefighters were shot in Idaho this week, two of them killed, after a 20-year-old man set a fire and lured them into an ambush before attacking from a perch in a tree. Much remains unknown about the motive of the shooter, whose body was found near the scene after the incident. He left no apparent manifesto, and his social media presence appears to have been wiped before his rampage. What is already clear, though, is that this is yet another case of a man who was mobilized to serious violence after years of escalating warning signs that went largely unreported.
The case comes right on the heels of another example of missed warning signs. Bryan Kohberger, who avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty this week to the murders of four Idaho college students, had a history of harmful behavior toward women, including alleged stalking and harassing women with “creepy comments,” and he was investigated for his conduct with women students before ultimately being fired from his university teaching assistant position for unsatisfactory performance and unprofessional behavior.
Even though one former classmate said that kids were “scared” of the shooter, they dismissed his Nazi and gun obsessions as “weird” or “edgy” behavior from a kid who was “just messing around.”
After this week’s ambush on the Idaho firefighters, USA Today reported that the suspect’s former classmates said the shooter had “Nazi tendencies,” had repeatedly drawn swastikas and guns in his notebooks and was “obsessed with guns.” There had been significant “trouble with a girl” that his peers reported had led to his expulsion from school. He was homeless after losing his housing when he was caught making violent hand gestures at a security camera.
Perhaps most disturbingly, according to the same report, even though one former classmate said that kids were “scared” of the shooter, they dismissed his Nazi and gun obsessions as “weird” or “edgy” behavior from a kid who was “just messing around” or “trying to stand out.”
It’s hard to blame them. Hateful symbols and messages that once would have shocked and offended have become increasingly normalized. Over the past few years, celebrities and political leaders have regularly made racist, misogynist and antisemitic statements or failed to condemn them. Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, has praised Hitler, and he launched a new album this year featuring a swastika on its cover and advertised swastika T-shirts during the Super Bowl.
Donald Trump hosted a white supremacist and Holocaust denier for a 2022 dinner at his Florida home. Basketball star Kyrie Irving posted a link for an antisemitic film, leading the Brooklyn Nets and the NBA to issue statements against hate speech. Trump adviser Stephen Miller said at campaign rally crowd in 2024 that America is for Americans only, falsely claiming that the U.S. immigration system allows gangs to come and “rape and murder little girls.”
It’s hard to understate the danger of this kind of normalization of hate, especially in a moment when antisemitic incidents, along with other forms of hate, have spiked or broken records in recent years. Hateful and inflammatory rhetoric that demonizes groups of people can incite violence from lone wolf individuals who are inspired to act. Known as stochastic violence or terrorism, this type of violence is a growing threat to public safety because it is “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable” — in other words, we know that hateful rhetoric is statistically likely to produce hateful violence, but we cannot predict where or when that violence will occur.
This makes it even more essential that communities learn how to recognize warning signs of violent mobilization rather than dismiss or ignore them. This includes understanding that racist, antisemitic and hateful ideas are not normal and are not just edgy, attention-seeking behaviors.
It also requires being better equipped to understand what the escalating risks of violence look like. Most mass shooters, including school shooters, show signs of crisis or personal instability, or actually leak their intentions prior to their attacks, to friends or family, on social media, or via other means. One study of mass public shooters in the U.S. found that 87% of perpetrators shared violent thoughts or intent prior to their attacks, in some form.
Recognizing warning signs will not help if there are not systems in place for individuals to know where to report, along with informed assessment mechanisms and therapeutic interventions that work. But prevention has to start with individuals and communities who recognize the danger of normalized hate and refuse to dismiss it as “just a joke.”
We will never be able to catch every violent actor before they commit harm. After a failed assassination attempt on the British prime minister in 1984, the Irish Republican Army issued a statement saying “we only have to be lucky once — you have to be lucky always.” But we make bad actors’ “luck” a whole lot more likely by normalizing, downplaying or ignoring hate. And the latest two examples from Idaho — the targeted shooting of first responders and the guilty plea of a murderer of sleeping college students — are tragic reminders of missed opportunities to recognize, report and intervene in escalating pathways of radicalization to violence.
Those missed opportunities are the result of our collective, systemic failure to take prevention seriously. We all deserve more than luck to keep us safe.
