The U.S. Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center released a report on Tuesday highlighting what the agency called a growing terrorism threat posed by "involuntary celibates" who are those that are motivated to violence because of their inability to develop and maintain sexual or romantic relationships with others, especially women.
In the 26-page report, it makes the case for more involvement from experts to intervene and do behavioral threat assessments to prevent violence against women.
The report said that "there is no one profile of an individual who plans or executes an act of targeted violence," but urges support for investigators to consider potential targets writing that suspects "explore multiple targets during the planning process, before making their final selection."
The report particularly highlights the case of 40-year-old gunman Scott Paul Beierle who opened fire inside a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida killing two women and injuring four more before turning the firearm on himself to die by suicide.
Steve Driscoll, a lead research specialist at NTAC said, "During his teen years, the attacker was accused of stalking his classmates, and he wrote stories that centered around violent themes."
Driscoll said, "One of those stories was 81 pages long and involved the protagonist murdering several girls before committing suicide. The female characters in the story that were killed represented the attacker's actual classmates from his high school, but he slightly changed the names in his writing."
Researchers wrote in the report, "This attacker's history highlights the specific threat posed by misogynistic extremism." Going on to say, "This gender-based ideology, sometimes referred to as 'male supremacy' has received increased attention in recent years from researchers, government agencies and advocacy groups due to its association with high-profile incidents of mass violence."
The study said, "The behavioral history of the Hot Yoga Tallahassee attacker illustrates many of the behavioral threat assessment themes identified through years of U.S. Secret Service research examining targeted violence."
Requests from the Secret Service for training have jumped dramatically in recent years fueled by an increase in the number of mass casualty events like school shootings, but also in an increase in misogynistic motivated murders in recent years.
The National Threat Assessment Center estimates that the number of participants in targeted violence training and threat assessment training has risen to more than 26,000 in the last year alone.
