One dead, two injured at NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade in a gatecrashing incident. Reuters.

An aerial view of the scene. Reuters/NBC4. 

Two people were shot at the NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade in a gatecrashing incident. Reuters. One of the suspects died while a gate guard was injured as well. The suspects drove their SUV through the gate after failing to head instructions from the guards. They crashed into a parked NSA police car before being shot. The two men were dressed as women and may have been transgender. The vehicle was stolen and there are reports of weapons and drugs in the SUV. No motive or cause has been determined for the incident but officials have ruled out terrorism as a motive. 

My Comment:

Here's your weird news story for the day. When this story was breaking this morning I was very confused. Of course the NSA has been in the news lately for spying on pretty much everyone, so naturally I figured that it had been an attack in response to that. I'm pretty glad that isn't the case since the criticism of the NSA is important. A terrorist incident at the NSA would undermine that criticism, especially if the attack was done by a critic of the NSA. 

Instead this seems like it was two people out on a crime spree. The vehicle was stolen and there were reports that the two men had weapons and drugs with them. My guess is that they were high and looking for trouble. When they came across a gate guard who told them something they didn't want to hear they just ran the gate and got killed for it. 

Now I am a critic of the NSA but in this case the officers did nothing wrong. Given that the NSA is a huge target for both domestic and foreign terrorists they must have been thinking that this was a genuine attack. For all the officers knew these two men could have been suicide bombers or worse. Shooting them was justified, especially after they rammed a police vehicle. This was a good shooting. I'm hoping that the guards involved don't end up under the kind of scrutiny that so many other officers do when there is a shooting. An lets also hope that the officer/guard wounded in the attack makes a full recovery.

I'm half expecting this to turn into another social justice issue if it turns out the two men really are transgender. I'm sure that someone on twitter or tumblr will claim that the only reason these two men died was because they were transgender, even if they weren't. I'm sure some would even be pissed at me because I didn't call these men women, even though there has been no confirmation that they are even transgender. In short gender politics is a minefield even when it is clear that these two were criminals. 

Also, a story about a couple of men dressed as women who got shot for gatecrashing sounds like the plot out of some terrible black comedy. The real world is truly stranger then fiction.