Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal was formally charged last week in the horrific shooting of National Guardsmen Andrew Wolfe and Sarah Beckstrom in front of a Washington, D.C. metro stop. Lakanwal allegedly murdered Beckstrom in the shooting, while Wolfe is reportedly still struggling to recover; Attorney General Pam Bondi has indicated that the Department of Justice intends to seek the death penalty.
But while Lakanwal has his day in court, a bigger debate is still raging over who is actually to blame for the murder: the shooter, or President Donald Trump. In the wake of the shooting, many on the left rushed to pin the blame on Trump.
Critics argued that the president's National Guard deployment was a political stunt that had put Guardsmen like Wolfe and Beckstrom in the line of fire unnecessarily. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, asserted that the shootings came "after months of warnings that deployments would inflame tensions." The New Yorker's Jane Mayer took to X just hours after the shooting to label Trump's deployment a "political show" and assert that "these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed."
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The reality is that the deployment of the Guard to D.C., far from being a show, has driven down crime in the capital - a significant achievement in a city that has long been plagued by violence. And responsibility for Lakanwal's actions rests primarily with the killer himself, as well as with the Biden administration, which let him into the country in 2021 following its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
No one can dispute that D.C. has a serious violence problem - try as Trump's critics might. Prior to the deployment, the city's homicide rate was down from its 2023 peak, but still 70% higher than its recent low in 2014. Data from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan crime-policy organization, indicate that in 2024, D.C.'s homicide rate was higher than those of cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia. And as I've found in my own research, this violence is most concentrated in the District's poorest and most heavily minority areas. In the city, 95% of murder victims and suspects are Black, and 92% are men.
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The Guard's presence has almost certainly brought this violence down. Recent analysis from crime researcher Jeff Asher identifies a marked decline in shootings since the Guard came in. That's consistent with prior analysis done by CBS, as well as with the reductions in crime that Memphis, Tenn., has seen during its own National Guard deployment.
Some on the left may want to pretend that the guardsmen are just there for "show." But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that deploying armed government agents cuts crime, both by deterring lawbreaking and by relieving stress on overtaxed and short-staffed police departments. Anyone who professes to care about the well-being of D.C.'s poor, Black, young men should cheer, not jeer.
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The best available evidence indicates that Lakanwal's acts, moreover, were not motivated by the Guard's deployment. As far as we know, nothing about the presence of the National Guard in D.C. "inflamed" him to action. Rather, the picture that is beginning to emerge is of a disturbed individual allowed into the country after a hasty vetting process following the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
According to recent reports, Lakanwal had served with the CIA in his home nation of Afghanistan. He was evacuated to the United States under Operation Allies Welcome, the resettlement program initiated by the Biden administration following the Afghanistan withdrawal.
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These evacuees were ostensibly heavily vetted, both by the CIA and the administration. But apparently this vetting missed Lakanwal, who reportedly struggled with assimilation and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He "had been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weekslong cross-country drives" according to emails obtained by the Associated Press.
Lakanwal bears responsibility for the alleged shooting first and foremost. But there is also blame to be apportioned to whatever failure of vetting let such a person - no matter his prior service - into the country and left him free to deteriorate until he attacked. Lakanwal was one of the millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, admitted under the Biden administration; his is just the latest example of the perils of uncontrolled, irresponsibly managed immigration.
In that regard, people like Lakanwal are exactly whom the National Guard was deployed to the streets of Washington, D.C. to deter. Just as at the border, uncontrolled criminality has raged in the city.
The Guard's deployment was a vital corrective, not a pointless show. And claiming otherwise does a disservice to Staff Sgt. Wolfe and Spc. Beckstrom, and to every other law enforcement officer and guardsmen who puts his or her life on the line.
