This afternoon, blocks from the White House, a man sneaked up on two West Virginia National Guardsmen and shot them in the head with a handgun. Both soldiers are reportedly in critical condition. A motive has not been determined, but a recent Afghan immigrant named Rahmanullah Lakanwal is in custody, according to CBS News. Early photos of the suspect show a burly, bearded man being wheeled almost naked into an ambulance. Lakanwal entered the United States after the return of the Taliban in 2021, CBS reported.
The desire to speculate about motive is only human, but speculators beware: Why shoot a stranger in the head? is a trick question, and often reveals more about the thoughts of the one who answers it than of the one about whom it is asked. There is, of course, no reason to shoot a stranger. But some people, when they hear a gunshot, instinctively project their own view of the situation onto the mind of the apparent assailant.
After today’s shooting, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer called the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guardsmen to the streets of Washington a “political show” and asked “at what cost” this deployment was taking place. The White House social-media team called Mayer a “sick, disgusting ghoul” (oh, for the days when “Jane, you ignorant slut” was a joke rather than a plausible script for actual government press releases), as if she had implied that killing soldiers was a reasonable response to the illegality or stupidity of deploying them. Mayer’s original post did not, of course, defend the attack, but it made the trivial claim that if the deployment hadn’t happened, the Guardsmen would not be dead now. The decision to deploy troops to the District of Columbia (to combat crime and disorder, Donald Trump said, though courts have recently declared such a deployment illegal) may be right or wrong, but its rectitude does not depend on whether a random guy tries to kill two of the soldiers with a handgun.
Of course, facts might emerge that establish a clear motive, one that would relieve reporters of the peril of speculation. But even the absence of facts may suggest hints about the nature of the motive for this apparently senseless crime. When the absence of these details becomes prolonged, certain inferences become more plausible. No published reports yet suggest that the alleged assailant said anything when he attacked—no leftist slogans, no jihadist chants, no mentions of a favorite or least favorite U.S. war. He must not be explaining himself all that comprehensibly in captivity either. If he were, authorities could have said something by now about his reasoning or perhaps have just said, as they sometimes do, that “the suspect is talking.” That line and its variations remain absent from reports.
What little we know about the man is that he thought the best way to advance his interests was to walk up to a couple of soldiers, about as close as he could get to the White House, and try to kill them. This modus operandi is, all by itself, an indication of an unwell mind, if only because there is nothing one could wish to accomplish in the world that would not be better accomplished by doing something else. Someone who chooses such disordered means should be expected to be acting in service of equally disordered ends. The most surprising outcome to this bloody afternoon would be if it turned out that the assailant had been reading The New Yorker and agreed with Jane Mayer about the Trump administration’s undermining of the rule of law.
More likely, this alleged assailant is yet another case of a man motivated more by spleen than by brain. Coherent politics are, as always, an elite preoccupation, and more surprising when present than when absent.
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