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Notes -
Two National Guardsman shot in DC.
Situation is still developing... conflicting reports about deaths. Trump has already requested 500 more guardsmen to be deployed in the capital. I'm afraid that any commentary on my part will be pure speculation: I'll edit this OP as more information comes to light. Apologies for the shortness of this initial post.
I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.
Edit 1: Suspect has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a Afghan national evacuated back in 2021.
Edit 2: Speculatively, a linkedin profile of the same name seems to point him as being connected to a bunch of American NGOs. I'm always skeptical of these - the world is big enough for strangers to have the same names - but the face on the profile seems to match the suspect.
Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.
I am quite enjoying the responses to the effect of - "This is Trump's fault for putting those guardsmen into harm's way"
Um, excuse me? Can you please give me a reason why sending someone to Washington, DC constitutes "putting them into harm's way," and why this reasoning doesn't justify deploying the national guard?
Well, why are they deployed? Why is there a ton of tension and pressure around their deployment the a crazy ideologue can hook into?
Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.
Because Democrats are ideologically wedded to the idea that crime isn't real and that policing causes crime and the worst thing that could happen is for an increase in military-style crime deterrence to actually deter crime. Doubly so if that results in a win for Cheeto Hitler.
Very much agree about democrat delusion re: crime and enforcement, but my autism does not allow me to let this go.
This is statistical torture, the numbers are screaming as they are twisted into this narrative. Also kind of a rhetorical one as when you say "Ukraine" people read "front line of the Russo-Ukrainian war" but I imagine whatever stat underlies this is the mortality rate in the country overall, most of which is not a warzone. On the other side, if you are not a poor American involved in, or adjacent to, the drug trade, I imagine your odds of being shot in Chicago et al. are extremely, extremely low.
Also from the politics angle, the way and "vibe" in which these troops were deployed was intentionally maximally inflammatory, so I am not surprised that in a country with the most guns, a crazy person was baited into doing something dumb.
This past July, Chicago had ~45 murders against a population of 2.72 million. Ukraine had 286 civilians killed, against a population that seems a bit up in the air, but 35 million looks like a decent estimate, somewhat rounded down.
So in that month, Chicago had 16.67 murders per million people, and Ukraine had 8.17 civilians killed per million people.
Sure this is a bit cherry picked - though I chose July simply because that was the first search result with a tangible number of deaths for Ukraine. That article notes that the 286 dead civilians was "the highest since May 2022", and July is also usually a bumper month for urban crime. I don't think the comparison is completely off base, or unfair. If we restricted it to just active war zones or active gang wars, do the ratios really change that much?
If you're going to claim a city is more dangerous than a war zone, you have to include the people actually killed in the war - including the combatants. This isn't just cherry-picking, it's lying with statistics.
"Being a civilian in Chicago is more dangerous than being a civilian in Ukraine". Does that phrasing sound acceptable?
You're still not comparing like things. The vast majority of civilian.deaths in Chicago are criminals engaged in violent activity. Do you think the average citizen of Chicago would agree "I'd feel safer in Ukraine"?
You can make a point about high crime rates without juicing numbers dishonestly. In this case, "civilian" and "combatant" is exploiting a gap where you are comparing gang activity and warfare. Is it more dangerous to be a gangbanger in Chicago or a soldier in Ukraine? Is it more dangerous to be a non-combatant (not involved in drugs or warfare) in Chicago or in Ukraine?
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It's unfair because you're only including civilian deaths.
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