On Nov. 2, 2018, Maura Binkley gathered her equipment and walked into her usual hot yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida. She was a 21-year-old student at Florida State University, double-majoring in English and German, just months away from graduation.
That same day, Scott Paul Beierle entered the studio with a 9mm handgun and opened fire, killing Binkley and Nancy Van Vessem, a 61-year-old physician, and injuring four others, before turning the weapon on himself.
In the days that followed, the Tallahassee Police Department said investigators were “working around the clock to gain clarity” on why this shooting occurred. The motive remained unclear.
Yet further inspection into Beierle’s background shows this was anything but hazy. According to the Secret Service’s study, he was a self-described misogynist, aggrieved by his inability to form romantic relationships with women. He had been removed from his niece’s birthday party for touching young girls, was arrested three times for groping women in public and served a lease termination after assaulting a woman at his apartment pool.
Bierele was not an outlier, but rather a symptom of a far more disturbing disease.
Just four years earlier, Elliot Rodger drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house at University of California Santa Barbara, intending to kill the girls inside. He had spent months writing a 141-page manifesto detailing that women owed him sex, and that because of the supposed sexual power women hold, “there is no creature more evil and depraved than the human female.”
Similarly, on March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long drove to three Atlanta-area spas and killed eight people, six of them Asian women. He told police he was motivated by a “sex addiction” and wanted to “eliminate” sources of temptation — a framing that the Cherokee County sheriff initially repeated to the press almost sympathetically, noting that Long had “a really bad day.”
The United States government does not include gender or sexual orientation as categories within its national threat assessment classification of domestic violent extremism. Online misogyny and gender-based harassment are rarely counted as hate speech. Intimate partner violence and sexual violence are not classified as hate crimes.
The data, where it exists, is unsurprisingly incriminating. Sixty percent of mass shooters in the U.S. have a documented history of domestic and intimate partner violence — save for stalking, harassment, threats of sexual assault, LGBTQ+ hostility or online misogyny, which has notably escalated since 2011. A study by New York University notes that 83% of mass shooters in 2018 had engaged in some form of gender-based violence prior to the attack. It notes that misogyny is “the gateway, driver and early warning sign” of violent extremism.
Sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss argues that gendered understandings of the world, such as male entitlement to women’s bodies and patriarchal beliefs about power, establish “cognitive footholds for violent extremism to take root and grow,” creating a mental scaffolding that enables greater receptivity to propaganda, disinformation, and racist and misogynistic ideas.
The research is consistent across national and ideological contexts. Miller-Idriss writes that “hostile sexist and misogynist attitudes are often a bigger predictor of support for violent extremism than any other factor — including, in some countries, religiosity, age, gender, level of education and employment.”
Like many other cases of mass attacks, the Tallahassee shooting was hinted far in advance. Beierle’s history of violence towards women was documented across various spaces over the course of decades.
And like these many cases, despite a mire of documented violence, there was no intervention.
At the institutional level, domestic violence and violent extremism remain siloed into separate departments — and in the case of the federal government, separate bureaus entirely. Domestic violence is handled by the Department of Justice as a local interpersonal issue. Mass violence is handled by the Department of Homeland Security as a national security issue. This distinction reveals a longstanding refusal to treat violence against women as a precursor to a public safety crisis rather than a private domestic incident.
This gap in policy has a solution, even if it lacks political will. Miller-Idriss has called for misogyny to be integrated into threat models used in national security, including, for example, in lists of concerning behaviors that prompt intervention. Gender-based violence should be categorized as a hate-crime — a long overdue change hindered due to normalization. And platforms must rethink the roles that their algorithms play in funneling men towards increasingly radicalizing content.
For those of us who are not federal officials, the work is simpler in theory if not in practice. After the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, many teenagers who had observed the gunman’s extreme misogyny and violent threats towards teen girls said they didn’t report it because it’s just “what online is.” This normalization is arguably the most dangerous thing we can choose to believe — not because it is unusual, but because it is not.
In every instance highlighted, the institutions surrounding the perpetrator had long known something was wrong, and yet the connection wasn’t made. Until that changes, the pattern does not end with them.
