A shooter’s race and religion are also often scrutinized, especially when the shooter is not white or Christian.But leaning so heavily on shooters’ political identity to understand mass violence fails to capture the evolving profile of people who decide to enact mass and targeted violence, said Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for countering digital extremism.Identifying shooters as either Democrats or Republicans goes against a growing body of research showing that the nation’s most high-profile shootings in recent years have been committed by people who were most influenced by online spaces, where traditional politics is largely irrelevant.“When we try to distill them into a simple binary of politics, we’re missing the larger picture,” Kriner said. “These actors are not solely motivated by that, and it’s missing the grievance that’s driving this violence that is not ideological, partisan or political.”He said: “What we find, more often than not, is that the politics of a shooter are less relevant. It’s about the fixation on violence.