It happened again

On Wednesday November 26th, as we were all preparing for the labor and joy of Thanksgiving day, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an asylum holder from Afghanistan, shot and killed two National Guard service members mere blocks from the White House in DC. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe have since been pronounced dead by injuries sustained from the shooting. Lakanwal is currently in custody after sustaining comparatively minor injuries in the shootout.

Any conversation of this shooting would be incomplete without bringing up that neither Beckstrom or Wolfe should not have been there. The National Guard's presence in Washington DC is 100% unnecessary, and is the action of a petty wannabe despot who alternates between being terrified by his phone and Fox News. Beckstrom and Wolfe would be alive right now discussing how their Thanksgiving Dinner went, if not for the paranoid exploits of a fascist government.

Personally, I don't like talking about these things, and I have a hard rule against talking about these stochastic terror shootings within the first 24 hours of the News breaking. Misinformation and assumptions are always abound and are often at their most metastasized in the first few hours. Suspects are called by the internet often hours before the police even reveal the identity, and by that time an entire innocent life can be ruined. Part of this is because these things are often nonsensical.

We have yet to get Lakanwal's motive, but I am assured it will probably make no sense. People don't leave behind their families and drive across state with a .357 revolver, and shoot two low level soldiers in the National Guard because their mind operating clearly. His motives are likely a mix of things with a mix of sensibilities and a mix of sanities. This is often what is infuriating about these conversations.

This is what makes these shootings, these things that keep happening while we discuss what we definitely will not do to stop them until another one happens, and we start this over. So much is always filled with smoke that can be used by political opportunists. A lot of ink is being spilled, for instance, on Mr. Lakanwal's Asylum Status. You see, the suspect is an Afgani native, who came over following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. He also has been confirmed to have connections with the CIA, as we was part of a Afgani Task Force: the Scorpion Forces. The Trump Administration has tried to use his refugee status to blame Biden's vetting process for asylum seekers, a point slightly undercut by the fact that Mr. Lakanwal's Asylum was granted in April of this Year, under the rules of the Trump Administration.

Honestly this feels like another strain in a long line of nonsensical killings, where a disturbed man went to great lengths to do something simply mean and pointless. A hollow action of senseless brutality that will of course get us to argue among ourselves at whose fault it is that a man lost his mind and did something that sometimes those who lose their mind do: hurt people. And because it's easier to yell at each other instead of having long and difficult conversations about what can be done to prevent such senseless violence, we find it easier to blame each other for the horror.

So the thing that happened again will simply keep happening.