In many mass shootings, the motivation is clear. The shooter is part of an ideological group (neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc.) with obvious aims and targets and makes that fact evident. Or they write a screed that points directly to their motivations. What makes shooters like the Highland Park gunman more difficult to understand is that while hateful, racist, and antisemitic beliefs almost certainly factored into his actions, his digital footprint was purposely designed to emphasize the violence over any ideological leanings.
When something not quite clear cut like this occurs, experts also warn about retroactively reinterpreting aesthetics through the lens of ideology. In
a thread on Twitter, Marc-André Argentino, extremism researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University, cautioned both citizens and researchers against holding up one part “of this attacker's complex web of motivations as the single motivating factor for this attack.”