On Wednesday, just two blocks from the White House, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were ambushed and shot by a lone gunman wielding a large-caliber revolver. One of the Guard members, U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, was killed in the attack. She was just 20 years old. U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was also critically wounded. According to President Donald Trump, the 24-year-old Wolfe is “fighting for his life.”
The alleged gunman, against whom authorities will seek the death penalty, is an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal. Officials say he drove across the country to carry out his attack. He was possibly motivated by Islamic extremism, given reports that one of the soldiers who helped take him down heard Lakanwal yelling “Allahu akbar” during the attack.
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While the attack itself could not have been specifically predicted, some of the commentary in its wake has been politically predictable. Jane Mayer, a vocal Trump critic, took to X to blame the president for the tragedy. Mayer wrote that the Guard members “had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash,” that the Guard’s presence in D.C. was “for political show,” and that Beckstrom and Wolfe “should never have been deployed.”
Echoing Mayer on PBS, former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem criticized the president’s decision to deploy Guardsmen in D.C., which she said left them with an unclear mission that “made them vulnerable.” In its coverage of the shooting, the New York Times ended a reported piece with a quote from a West Virginia resident who blamed the president, stating that the Guardsmen “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Some might make that same claim about Lakanwal, but the Times apparently could not find anyone saying so for its coverage.
It’s not clear how the president’s decision created the conditions for a deranged Afghan national to leave behind a wife and five children, drive approximately 2,500 miles with a handgun, and attack soldiers in D.C. But the argument sounds an awful lot like victim blaming. If in fact a foreign national carrying out an attack in the name of Islam was a predictable consequence of the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard to fortify the streets of Washington, D.C., against a crime plague, then the country has much bigger problems.
Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield called the shooting a tragedy. But he also seemed to blame the administration, stating that the Guardsmen “should not be on the streets,” apparently because “They are not trained as police officers and are ill-equipped for the job being asked of them.”
If the argument here is that military troops are more vulnerable to a lone wolf ambush than police officers, it’s baseless. Many police officers have been killed in similar attacks over the years.
What’s more, the claim that the mission of National Guardsmen in D.C. is new and unusual is also incorrect. Guard members have been doing high-visibility patrols at sensitive targets throughout the country since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Since it was established in 2003, for example, New York’s National Guard Joint Task Force Empire Shield has been augmenting the efforts of local law enforcement agencies to help secure sensitive sites such as Penn and Grand Central Stations.
Those blaming Trump for this week’s shooting also seem blinded to a glaring contradiction in their argument, one illustrated by the far-left Free DC Project, which put out a statement calling the Trump deployment of the Guard “a danger to . . . the Guard members themselves.” In the same statement, the organization that has pushed for abolishing ICE and accused the Guardsmen of “occupying” D.C. went on to claim that the deployment was “unnecessary”—presumably because the crime problem they were responding to wasn’t that serious. Indeed, Kayyem made this same point in her interview with PBS, where she noted that Trump had deployed the Guard “despite decreasing crime rates.”
But if Washington’s streets were too safe to justify the Guard deployment, then how could the deployment have placed the Guard in harm’s way?
If this Thanksgiving-eve attack raises salient political questions, they center on the presence of Lakanwal in the United States. Early reports seem to indicate that Lakanwal, who apparently had served alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, came into the country during President Biden’s administration and was recently granted asylum by the second Trump administration. One hopes that such inquiries will be undertaken soberly, but the instantaneous politicization of the shooting counsels against such optimism.
Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images