Europe's media sees ambush on Guard as opposition to deployment, another case of too many guns

The shooting last week of two National Guard members just blocks from the White House was recounted with different narratives on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Much of the U.S. coverage of the events of last week focused on the country’s oft-criticized immigration system and the screening process for refugees.

But while European media reported the fact that the alleged shooter – Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan father of five – was seeking asylum in the U.S., most coverage cast it as evidence of an increasingly polarized country, dangers of the proliferation of guns, and the controversial deployment of National Guard troops.

One of the soldiers shot, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died on Thursday, the day after the shooting, President Donald Trump announced. The other victim, Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in critical condition.

“She’s no longer with us,” Trump said of Beckstrom. “She was savagely attacked and she’s dead now.”

Trump, who dispatched 500 new troops to join the estimated 2,000 already stationed in the U.S. capital, called the incident “an act of evil, an act of hatred, and an act of terror,” stating it was “a crime against our entire nation.”

In Europe, the basic facts were reported in the same way, though interpretations of the events varied.

According to Milan media commentator and academic Maurizio Pugno, the focus of media coverage of complex tragedies often reflects national or editorial sentiment as much as an objective examination of events.

“In America, the shooting is seen as a refugee problem, and in Europe it’s seen as an American problem,” Pugno told Just the News. “To an extent, that must reflect growing sentiment that is critical of the U.S., sparked by strained trade ties and friction over different political agendas.”

In Italy, the Catholic daily Avvenire said the shooting “highlighted tensions over using soldiers as a tool for public order,” while La Stampa said the ambush provided fodder for the American Republicans and Democrats to criticize each other, with “the White House arguing for more troops and critics warning that militarization itself is destabilizing.”

Le Monde in Paris called the attack a “brazen act of violence” that it said was creating the “political temptation to turn a one-off case into a migration crackdown.”

In Spain, El País reported that crime in Washington, D.C., was at a 30-year low and said its correspondent opined that the shooting was “being instrumentalized to harden immigration and public order policy rather than a reflection on gun violence or polarization.”

Germany’s Frankfurter Rundshau accused U.S. Democrats of being “too weak to counter” the likelihood that the incident would be used to fuel “online hate against migrants and minorities” while Switzerland’s news site Watson said the U.S. was suffering from “an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and performative toughness that makes violence more likely.”

Among the continent’s English-language media, Euronews examined the White House’s call for a “re-examination of all aliens in the United States” and references to Afghanistan as a “hellhole.” The London daily, The Guardian, focused on proposed reforms to asylum laws and rates of gun ownership, “contrasting the structural gun problem with the political focus on refugees.”