The National Guard shooter's story is not simple. He was admitted to the U.S. by the Biden administration through a hurried, temporary parole program that had a documented history of helping Afghan immigrants on the terrorism watch list. Yet, he was granted asylum here by the Trump administration. He wasn’t just an “Afghan national,” but someone who worked with the CIA and whose brother was a military leader in an elite CIA squad. According to Kristi Noem, he was radicalized in the U.S. after immigrating, which would both absolve the Biden administration of negligence and bolster the argument that allowing these migrants in is risky, even when they clear the vetting process.
It's true that this is the fourth publicly reported Afghan national to be arrested for an act or potential act of terrorism since just last October. And it's true this shooter is one of just 190,000 Afghan refugees who resettled here after the fall of Kabul in 2021.
One high-profile shooter in 190,000 people isn’t exactly an endemic issue. For comparison, that’s roughly the same odds of being born with 11 fingers or toes, or of being struck by lightning (if you spend a lot of time outside). There are zero instances of mass shootings in the U.S. committed by Afghan-born people in the last 10 years, and just six Afghan-born perpetrators of attacks on U.S. soil in the last 50 years — 2.5% of all foreign-born attackers.
What's nuts to me is that some aspects of this story are heart-breakingly typical. The shooter was a 20-something male. He had military experience. He was prone to long periods of isolation and was struggling financially. Community members expressed concern about him prior to the act of violence. All of this is common for mass shooters in America.
We have broken immigration programs we can fix, but painting this as a vetting issue, an Afghan immigrant issue, a Biden or Trump issue; it's all just way too basic. We still don't even know his motive or how he got his gun. Until we recognize that violent events like this aren't singularly attached to your pet issue, we're never going to get anywhere.
In the past 96 hours in Syria, Islamists have murdered over a thousand innocent civilians through, rape, beheadings, and torture.
Amnesty International? Silent.
The Red Cross? Silent.
Human Rights Watch? Silent.
So, after ~a billion man-hours were wasted on this debate, the #MLB All-Star game moved from a 51% Black city to a 9% Black city- also in a state which requires voter ID and has "just" 2 weeks of early voting?
We all oppose real racism, but this is what "useless wokeness" means.