Shooters for hire: What’s fuelling the Canadian increase in outsourced violence?

Canada is facing an attribution problem when it comes to extremist violence. The person who pulls the trigger may not be the person who has the motive; in some recent cases, there may be no single motive at all. An emerging form of brokered violence involves local youth, encrypted communications, symbolic targets, recorded attacks, payment and multi-layered motives. Put simply, this is motive-fragmented violence: the motive may be split among the shooter, recruiter, payer, ideological…