When a place of prayer becomes a target
A statement and analysis from Kearnan Consulting Group, LLC
Earlier today, the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in San Diego County and home to the Al Rashid Weekend School, became the site of a deadly attack. Three adults, among them a security guard whose actions police have publicly described as heroic, were killed. The two young assailants, identified by law enforcement as 17 and 18 years of age, took their own lives at the scene. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl has stated the case is being investigated as a hate crime, with anti-Islamic writings reportedly recovered from the suspects’ vehicle.
Before any analysis, the people closest to this loss deserve the first word. To the families of those killed, to the worshippers and educators of the Islamic Center, to the children whose Sunday classroom was made a place of fear, and to the broader Muslim community of San Diego: we extend our sincere condolences and our solidarity. The dignity of the victims, the courage of the staff who shielded students, and the work of the first responders who contained the threat are what should be remembered first.
Kearnan Consulting Group, LLC offers this analysis not to comment on the criminal investigation, which belongs properly to law enforcement, but to address the harder, longer question that families, faith leaders, school administrators, and policymakers are again being forced to ask: what is happening to our young people, and why do houses of worship and schools keep finding themselves in the path of it?
A pattern that has not gone away
Attacks against faith communities are not new, but the breadth and persistence of the threat continue to climb. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in its security guide for houses of worship, examined ten years of targeted attacks against such sites and found that sixty-seven percent of the perpetrators were motivated by hatred of a racial or religious identity associated with the targeted congregation, and that fifty-eight percent of known attackers engaged in observable planning behavior before acting. The U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, in its review of 173 mass attacks in public spaces from 2016 through 2020, similarly catalogued attacks against businesses, schools, military installations, and houses of worship, and concluded that about one quarter of attackers subscribed to conspiratorial or hateful ideologies, while roughly half acted on perceived grievances.
The most recent FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data reinforces the religious dimension of this trend. In 2024, religious bias accounted for 23.5 percent of reported single-bias hate crime incidents, with antisemitic incidents reaching the highest figure ever recorded and anti-Muslim incidents numbering 256, roughly nine percent of religiously motivated crimes. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, in its own 2025 civil rights report, documented 8,658 complaints in 2024, the largest annual total in the organization’s nearly thirty-year history.
The picture is no more reassuring for schools. The K-12 School Shooting Database, maintained by my friend and researcher David Riedman, recorded 352 school shooting incidents in 2023 and 336 in 2024, the two highest annual totals in the database’s history, which extends back to 1966. Even with the partial decline reflected in 2025, annual incidents remain more than double pre-pandemic levels, and roughly fifty-five percent of active shooter events at educational institutions since Columbine have taken place in high schools. When the building is both a school and a house of worship, as was the case today in San Diego, both threat profiles converge in a single location.
What today’s events in San Diego make clear, yet again, is that the people who gather in these buildings to pray, to learn, and to teach are not collateral. They are the target.
What is driving so many young people toward violence
Both assailants in today’s attack were teenagers. That fact, alone, deserves more than a passing mention. While violent extremist attacks by minors remain statistically rare, the underlying conditions that produce them are not.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health reported that up to ninety-five percent of adolescents ages 13 to 17 use a social media platform, with more than a third reporting use that is nearly constant, and that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media face roughly double the risk of poor mental health outcomes such as depression and anxiety. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data through 2021 showed a sixty-two percent increase in the suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 between 2007 and 2021, alongside a sixty percent rise in the homicide rate in that same age group from 2014 through 2021. More recent CDC figures indicate modest declines from those pandemic-era peaks, but firearms remain the leading method of youth suicide.
The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research center that maintains a comprehensive database of mass shooters, has examined the life histories of more than 170 perpetrators of public mass shootings. Its researchers, Dr. Jillian Peterson and Dr. James Densley, found that approximately thirty-one percent of mass shooters had experienced severe childhood trauma, and that the figure rises to roughly sixty-eight percent among K-12 school shooters specifically. They also documented that most mass shooters reach an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months before an attack, that two-thirds communicate their intentions to someone in advance, and that public mass shootings exhibit a measurable social contagion effect in the days immediately following another high-profile attack.
Beneath the numbers lies a more difficult truth. A generation of young Americans is coming of age in an information environment that is simultaneously more isolating and more inflammatory than anything previous generations encountered. RAND Corporation researchers, in interviews with former extremists, repeatedly identified the same pathway markers: social isolation, loneliness within school or community settings, and exposure to online communities that offered identity, belonging, and a target for grievance. George Washington University’s Program on Extremism has described this as a third generation of online radicalization, one shaped less by formal organizations than by decentralized digital ecosystems in which adolescents can self-radicalize within weeks.
We will not know for some time what specifically drove the two young men in San Diego. What we do know is that the conditions which allow such a trajectory to take root, untreated mental health distress, ideological exposure unmediated by trusted adults, easy access to firearms, and an adolescent culture in which violence increasingly competes with hope as a form of meaning, are widespread. The question is not whether another young person is being drawn down a similar path tonight. The question is whether someone close to that young person sees it in time, and whether the people around them know what to do.
Implications for security, prevention, and resilience
For houses of worship, faith-based schools, and any institution that opens its doors as a matter of mission, the lesson of today is not to close those doors. It is to recognize that hospitality and security are not opposites.
A defensible posture for vulnerable institutions rests on several interlocking elements. The first is honest vulnerability assessment, which means examining the building, the schedule, the access points, and the routines through the eyes of someone who would do harm, and then closing the gaps that are most likely to be exploited. The second is behavioral threat assessment, the discipline of identifying and managing concerning behavior before it becomes violent. The Secret Service’s NTAC research is unambiguous on this point, and The Violence Project’s finding that roughly two-thirds of mass shooters communicate their intentions to someone before acting reinforces the same conclusion: targeted violence is preventable when communities are equipped to recognize warning signs and intervene early. The third is layered physical security that complements rather than replaces the human element, from access control and trained on-site personnel to coordination with local law enforcement and clear emergency protocols rehearsed by staff, clergy, and educators alike. The fourth is community resilience, the deliberate cultivation of trust between a congregation, its neighbors, and the agencies sworn to protect it, so that suspicious behavior is reported and concerning individuals are connected to mental health and intervention resources before a crisis arrives.
For the parents, teachers, coaches, and clergy who shape young lives, the responsibility is different but related. The early signals of a young person drifting toward violence are seldom hidden. They surface in language, in online activity, in withdrawal, in fascination, in access to weapons, and in expressed grievance. The most effective interventions are almost always relational, and they begin long before any law enforcement involvement is appropriate. National frameworks such as the FBI’s behavioral threat assessment guidance and school-based teams modeled on Secret Service NTAC findings exist precisely because the people best positioned to interrupt a trajectory are rarely officers in uniform. They are the people who already know the young person’s name.
How Kearnan Consulting Group can help, today
For faith-based organizations, nonprofits, and schools that recognize they need to act but are not sure where to begin, Kearnan Consulting Group, LLC offers a portfolio of proven solutions already in use by congregations, religious schools, and nonprofit campuses across the country. Our work is built to align with each state’s relevant legislation governing FBOs, nonprofit corporations, and K-12 institutions, and our planning frameworks are vetted to meet the documentation standards expected by most major insurance carriers, reducing both risk and premium exposure for the institutions that adopt them.
Our offerings for congregations, faith-based schools, and nonprofit organizations include:
- Emergency Response Plans tailored to houses of worship and faith-based schools, structured to satisfy state-specific requirements and insurer expectations
- Family Reunification Plans designed for use during and after an active threat, integrated with local law enforcement and EMS protocols
- Active Threat, Run-Hide-Fight, and Stop-the-Bleed training for clergy, staff, ushers, security teams, and volunteers
- Vulnerability and physical security assessments aligned with CISA’s Mitigating Attacks on Houses of Worship framework
- Behavioral threat assessment program design, including reporting workflows and intervention pathways for at-risk youth
- Tabletop exercises and live drills calibrated to congregation size, school enrollment, and worship schedule
- Ready-to-implement guideline packages and downloadable templates, priced for accessibility so that smaller congregations and nonprofits are not left without options
These materials are not theoretical. They are the same plans, training curricula, and best-practice guides we deploy with congregations and faith-based schools nationwide, refined over years of operational use. For institutions that need to begin protecting their people this week rather than next year, Kearnan Consulting Group provides immediate-use downloads, virtual onboarding, and on-site support packages that can be scaled to any budget.
Closing
The Islamic Center of San Diego will reopen. It always does. American faith communities have absorbed losses of this kind before and have returned to prayer with a steadiness that humbles those of us who work in the protective professions. What we owe them, in return, is not platitudes but competence: clear-eyed assessment, practical protective measures, and a sustained societal effort to understand why so many young Americans are arriving at adulthood with violence as an answer.
Kearnan Consulting Group, LLC remains committed to that work. We stand ready to support houses of worship, faith-based schools, and vulnerable institutions of every tradition in building the assessments, plans, and partnerships that allow them to remain what they were built to be: places of welcome, learning, and faith.
Sources
- Reporting and statements from the San Diego Police Department news conference, May 18, 2026, as summarized by CNN, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, and Al Jazeera live coverage of the Islamic Center of San Diego shooting.
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Mitigating Attacks on Houses of Worship Security Guide, available at cisa.gov.
- U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, Mass Attacks in Public Spaces: 2016-2020 (released January 2023), and related NTAC publications.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2024 Hate Crime Statistics, Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
- Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2025 Civil Rights Report: Unconstitutional Crackdowns, released March 2025.
- K-12 School Shooting Database, maintained by David Riedman, accessible at k12ssdb.org. Annual incident totals and Columbine-onward location breakdowns drawn from the database’s public data visualizations.
- Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2023.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Data Brief 471 and related 2024 and 2025 updates on suicide and homicide rates among Americans ages 10 to 24.
- The Violence Project, Key Findings and Mass Shooter Database, accessible at theviolenceproject.org; Peterson, J. and Densley, J., The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (Abrams Press, 2021).
- RAND Corporation, What Do Former Extremists and Their Families Say About Radicalization and Deradicalization in America?, Research Brief RBA1071-1.
- George Washington University Program on Extremism, The Third Generation of Online Radicalization, June 2023.