What major incidents of politically motivated shootings are associated with each party since 1990
Executive summary
Since 1990, the preponderance of clearly ideologically motivated, fatal mass shootings in the United States has been tied to right‑wing and white‑supremacist actors — with landmark attacks including Oklahoma City , Charleston , Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life , El Paso , and the 2022 Buffalo and Colorado Springs shootings — while violence by far‑left groups has tended to focus on property and is far less deadly in aggregate [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Right‑wing and white‑supremacist mass killings: the dominant pattern since 1990
Independent and advocacy datasets show that right‑wing extremist violence has been responsible for the majority of extremist‑linked fatalities in recent decades, with researchers and the ADL identifying white‑supremacist and anti‑immigrant motives behind several of the worst mass murders: the 2015 Charleston church massacre, the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, and the racist Buffalo supermarket massacre in 2022 are repeatedly cited as emblematic of this trend [3] [2] [1].
2. Big incidents that changed public perception and policy debates
The Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s remains a touchstone for modern domestic terrorism and accounts for a large share of extremist‑linked deaths in the 1990s, while the more recent supermarket and nightclub killings (Buffalo and Colorado Springs, 2022) together produced a disproportionate share of extremist mass‑killing deaths in the past few years and pushed the conversation about “accelerationist” white‑supremacist propaganda into the mainstream [1] [2].
3. Far‑left violence: smaller scale and more property‑oriented historically
Scholars who catalog ideologically motivated homicides find far‑left fatal violence much rarer than far‑right killings between 1990 and 2020, and reporting on campaigns like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front shows those movements historically favored arson and property attacks over mass shootings that target civilians [4] [3].
4. Many mass shootings are not partisan — and attribution is often murky
Experts and fact‑checkers repeatedly note that most mass killings are not primarily driven by partisan affiliation, and that the political party registration or claimed partisan identity of shooters is often unverified or irrelevant to motive; attempts to compile partisan lists of shooters have been debunked because voter records are incomplete and motivations are mixed or personal rather than party‑directed [5] [6] [7].
5. Data caveats, definitions, and competing interpretations
Different datasets use varying definitions — some count only ideologically motivated attacks, others include extremist‑connected killings or broader homicide categories — which affects conclusions about prevalence and partisan attribution; some research finds ideological motivations are inconsistent or mixed with personal grievances, complicating any simple tally by party [7] [4] [3].
6. Political uses and misuses of the violent‑actor record
Political actors and commentators have sometimes weaponized incomplete incident lists to claim one party’s supporters are uniquely violent, but fact checks and academic reviews warn that such lists often contain errors and conflate non‑ideological mass murderers with politically motivated extremists, an implicit agenda that skews public understanding [5] [6] [4].
7. What the evidence supports and what remains uncertain
The best available public reporting and academic compilations support two clear points: fatal extremist mass killings in recent decades have been dominated numerically and lethally by right‑wing actors, particularly white supremacists and sovereign‑citizen adherents [2] [3], and many mass shootings more broadly are driven by personal, mental‑health, or other non‑ideological factors rather than explicit party politics, leaving uncertainty about how many individual shooters can fairly be “associated” with a political party [5] [7] [8].