Domestic terrorist groups lack the organizational capacity to be a large-scale threat.
German et al 19 [Michael German is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, Hina Shamsi is the director of the ACLU National Security Project, David Schanzer is a professor of the practice at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy University and director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, Engy Abdelkader is based at Rutgers University where her teaching and research explore religion, race, and gender at the intersection of law, politics, and society , "Mass Violence Motivated by Hate: Are New Domestic Terrorism Laws the Answer? | N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change", November 20 2019,
So, why do Americans engage in violent extremism? I think it’s really interesting to kind of divide our homegrown extremists. We have found most recently are principally people who are loners [and] they have come to these ideas and the decision to engage in violence either on their own or sometime in pairs. And, that’s been true for the most part of both people on the top of the left-hand side of the slide, who were inspired by Al Qaeda and ISIS ideology and people on the bottom who were more inclined towards a white supremacist point of view. And I think this is a very, very different phenomenon [than what] was going on abroad, whether it be the Taliban or Hamas, or other violent extremist movements such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda as well, which are really much more foreign insurgencies against the ruling class, the state in these foreign countries. ISIS and Al-Qaeda especially do target foreigners and they do target Americans, which happened on 9/11. But, if you’re looking at the vast majority of terrorism, it’s coming from foreign groups who are much more involved in mass political movements rather than individuals.