ABSTRACT
The perpetrator of the latest mass shooting in the United States has been compared to Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik. But a closer understanding of his motives and actions is needed before making this connection. The first was at a midnight film screening in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado; the second was at a Sikh temple in Oak Tree, Wisconsin. The fact that the killer in Wisconsin embraced a xenophobic ideology has led commentators to compare the shooting at the Sikh temple not so much to the Colorado incident but rather to two earlier "extreme right terrorist acts". The post-9/11 experience, when there were many examples of Sikhs in the US being attacked and targeted because they were wrongly identified as Muslims, has led analysts to assume that Page was in the grip of the same "mistake". Both McVeigh and Breivik were connected to radical ideologies and subcultures that were well connected to mainstream discourse.
