The two men who carried out apparent terror attacks on New Year’s Day — killing 15 people by plowing a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans, and detonating a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas — both had U.S. military backgrounds, according to the Pentagon.

From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year, according to data from a new, unreleased report shared with The Intercept by Michael Jensen, the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.

Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a “mass casualty offender,” far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers.

  • Optional
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    73 days ago

    Terror agent? I drove a forklift.

    • @surewhynotlem
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      33 days ago

      Someone went around fixing the hand rails on the death star.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 days ago

      I filled bags, walked in time and did a lot of small circles.

      But this guy’s fine to lob insults from his homeroom desk.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 days ago

        Only to the virginity of every female out there who doesn’t have a forklift hubby yet.

        Ladies, I have my forklift cert. /tips_forks