Terrorist lethality has emerged as a key metric for evaluating counterterrorism success. Recent research, however, questions whether terrorist mass casualty events (TMCEs) are consistent with existing theories of terrorism and across heterogeneous terrorist ideological motivations. This study examines previously understudied control and learning theories and their impact on the likelihood of TMCEs from 1983 to 2020. Leveraging the Profiles on Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset, this study examines the causal conditions associated with TMCEs using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Across the three ideological motivations examined, too many unique pathways to TMCEs emerged to suggest support for either theoretical perspective. Further, some conditions, including education, were both risk and protective factors suggesting important unexplained heterogeneity.
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