Insights into Terrorists’ Weapon Choices Using Caterpillar Diagram

Terrorists aim for widespread attention and fear from the target society through every attack they perpetrate. They achieve this goal by increasing the ferocity of the attack to maximize damages, which they envision while planning an attack. The choice of weapon by the perpetrator for a particular terror attack is paramount in achieving this goal. This research investigates the most prominent weapon types terrorists utilize to maximize their ferocity using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Next, we implemented the innovative caterpillar diagram introduced by the authors in their earlier works to quantify the impact and its associated variations on the usage of a particular weapon type. The color schema based caterpillar diagram effectively captures this variation and facilitates comparative analysis across multiple countries. Further, we demonstrate that the state transition between consecutive cohorts of the caterpillar diagram imitates a Markovian process. The Markovian property helps to develop a predictive model for future variations in the usage of the concerned weapon type.