ABSTRACT
The shooting rampage by Omar Mateen at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, in which he killed 49 people and wounded 53, was the latest in a series of high-profile attacks by Islamist terrorists in the United States. It followed the shooting rampage by the husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik at a holiday party for County employees at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA, on December 5, 2015, killing 14 and injuring 22 others. Previous high-profile shooting or bombing attacks by American Islamists included Major Nidal Hasan’s shooting rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November 2009, Faisal Shahzad’s attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1, 2 010, the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombing of the Boston Marathon in mid-April 2013, and the shootings by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on July 16, 2015. In all of these attacks, the perpetrators were known (to a certain extent) as Islamist-inspired extremists by their family members or associates, yet these home-grown or immigrant perpetrators were able to slip through the seams of the relatively effective counterterrorism (CT) surveillance programs the United States had established following the catastrophic 9/11 attacks to track and thwart the suspicious activities of Islamist operatives in the country to carry out their attacks.
