White House Gunman Identified, Was Known to Secret Service
A court issued an order barring him from the area. He violated it and kept coming back. The Secret Service kept finding him loitering around the White House.
Nasire Best, 21, of Maryland, had been showing up at the White House for nearly a year before Saturday evening, when he pulled out a revolver and opened fire at a security checkpoint. Secret Service officers shot and killed him at the scene. At least one bystander was seriously wounded.
The White House Gunman is down.
Make no mistake about it… Democrats evil rhetoric is fueling this violence. pic.twitter.com/jWglLdoFrP
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 23, 2026
The agents who confronted him had seen him before. Court records show he was involuntarily committed in June 2025 after obstructing traffic near 15th Street and E Street NW, just blocks from where he would be killed eleven months later. The following month, he was arrested for unlawful entry after bypassing a restricted pedestrian control post at the White House perimeter. When agents detained him, he told them he was Jesus Christ and that he wanted to be arrested.
A court issued an order barring him from the area. He violated it and kept coming back. The Secret Service kept finding him loitering around White House entry posts in the months that followed. No political motive has been established. Best wasn’t a political operative with a manifesto; he was a deeply disturbed young man who kept returning, compulsively, to the same patch of federal ground until the day he arrived armed.
The shooting lasted seconds. Best fired a few rounds before officers cut him down. Members of the press corps on the White House grounds dove for cover as the shots rang out.
“It sounded like dozens of gunshots. We were told to sprint to the press briefing room,” ABC White House senior correspondent Selina Wang said.
The complex was locked down within minutes and cleared roughly 35 minutes later. Two other shootings near the White House preceded Saturday’s, one at the Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April, another involving Michael Marx, 45, of Texas, on May 4.
FBI Director Kash Patel said federal investigators were on scene.
“FBI is on the scene and supporting Secret Service responding to shots fired near White House grounds,” Patel wrote on X. “We will update the public as we’re able.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was “grateful for the brave Secret Service agents who took quick, decisive action to protect President Trump,” adding that his prayers were with the victims. Trump was inside the White House at the time, working on an Iran peace deal, and was never in immediate danger.
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Comments
This made me think of the classic Danny Elfman tune, Only A Lad:
Only a lad
He really couldn’t help it
Only a lad
He didn’t want to do it
Only a lad
He’s underprivileged and abused
Perhaps a little bit confused
I prefer Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy”.
Sure, they shot him dead.
Let’s wait until Monday. 72 Hour Rule in effect for this one, definitely.
I’m pretty sure that he’ll still be dead in 72 hours. 😛
Pretty sure he’s not rising from the dead after three days …
If he does, and sees his own shadow, we get another six weeks of spring!
We get 6 more assassination attempts.
What about Generalissimo Francisco Franco then????
I’m so old I remember when Saturday Night Live was funny…
Always known
But nothing really done to know wtf they are up to
People who are that mentally unwell need to be separated from society. I know the ACLU has a hissy fit about that but everyone else has a right as well not to be killed by some psycho that they keep letting out of mental hospitals. My small town has a bout a dozen people who NEED to be involuntarily committed but there’s no place to put them.
Bottom of a river is a good start
This is kind of funny… because in my town, that’s exactly where our ration of “those people” already live,
I guess it spoils the joke to know that there’s only water in it maybe four days a year.
If there’s no “political motive,” why fixate on the White House, and why fixate on the White House now? Was he not mentally ill when Biden was in the White House? There may be no “political motive” that we can understand, but somewhere in his defective brain he had a reason to direct violence towards not just the White House, but this White House. Could he have heard something that made him think there was something at the White House that needed extermination? We all know the answer to that question.
Usually when they say ‘no political motive’ they discount any left wing beliefs as being ‘political’.
He may not have been that ill two years ago. He may have been fixating on that location for some reason that had nothing to do with it being near the White House. Until this one time that he brought a weapon he gave no indication that he meant any violence, so if he thought he was Jesus perhaps he simply wanted to convey a message to the President, or give him a blessing or something. Who knows what goes on in these people’s minds?
I recently spoke to someone who had been in prison, and he told me that there was one fellow there who seemed to have no idea that he was in prison. He would tell people that he was the Pope, and he’d wander around striking up conversations with people at random, about nothing at all. My acquaintance didn’t know what this person had done, or was alleged to have done, but he clearly belonged in a hospital, not in a prison.
Or the White House is attracting nut jobs now because of who occupies it. If he has a longer history of mental illness than what has so far been revealed, questions about his motive will be valid (not that they aren’t now). But he was obviously fixated on the location, because he had multiple contacts with protective services there and that’s the location to which he brought a weapon (for certain) and at which fired it.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is circumstance. Three times is enemy action.”
Auric Goldfinger
in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger
But he was obviously fixated on the location, because he had multiple contacts with protective services there and that’s the location to which he brought a weapon (for certain) and at which fired it.
Yes, but the location wasn’t the White House, it was near the White House. For all we know it may have some enormous significance to him, without reference to the famous location that’s nearby. Perhaps it’s the spot where his spirit guide appears to him, or where his time machine is buried, or some other such fantasy. We can’t know.
He may even not know who the president is. He may sometimes think he is the president. Expecting crazy people to make sense is, well, crazy.
Sheesh! Yes, he probably was mentally ill two years ago. Period. And he never should have been released back into the public sphere.
He’s 21. That’s around the age when this sort of thing sets in. So it’s entirely possible that he wasn’t like this when Biden was president. Or that he doesn’t even know who the president is.
Doesn’t matter. An explanation is never an excuse, no matter how many times the Left tries to pass it off as one.
Well, why should anyone expect him to know, better than the president did?
Do not try to rationalize the irrational act. When you try to invent reasons for a mentally ill person’s act, you are only imagining what unknowable thoughts that person has.
That’s exactly my point. Attributing a political motive to him, let alone claiming that he intended to shoot the President, or that he even had any ill will to him, is exactly the sort of speculation you’re denouncing. It’s inventing reasons for something whose real reason we can’t know.
Sure, that’s possible but is it probable? I can’t imagine that this guy only went Cray Cray on Saturday, that no one in the last two years of interactions with him didn’t see ‘something’ was off about him. That’s just not likely.
IMO someone ‘crashing out’ aka throwing a tantrum, screaming/yelling irrationally, intentionally creating a public disturbance, often including menacing behavior, threats, sometimes battery is enough to consider bringing them to psychological evaluation. Especially if that’s a pattern known to local cops, social workers, govt benefit offices and so on. Doesn’t mean they’ll be held indefinitely but a 72 hour hold for evaluation seems prudent. If they psychologists want to sign off on them as ‘not crazy’ staking their professional reputation on that evaluation/diagnosis then by all means release them…but if not then put them into a mental facility to get the care they need v leaving them out in public only not end up in jail or prison which ain’t supposed to be and ain’t equipped to be dealing with the insane.
staking their professional reputation on that evaluation/diagnosis
They don’t, though. That’s part of the problem. There should be the ability to sue a practitioner for negligence in these cases. That might motivate the psychs to give it a tougher look.
Pulling the licensure after a pattern develops is more what I had in mind or at least something like a ‘Brady list’ for mental health professionals who can’t seem to identify whether a person is/isn’t a ‘threat’ to the public.
No, he certainly didn’t just go crazy this week. He’s been acting irrationally, and continually showing up in that area, for nearly a year. But the fact that he started this a year ago and not two years ago when Biden was in office may simply be due to him having gone crazy a year ago and not two years ago. He’s at the right age for this sort of thing to set in. So there may be no connection at all with who happens to be president now.
The point though is the ongoing societal failure to honestly address the mentally ill. When ‘everyone’ knows a person is ‘off’ repeatedly menacing/stalking, crashing out tantrums, repeated LEO interactions where they are defiant/abusive, refuse to submit to detention/arrest …scoop them up and have them evaluated. If the psychologist is willing to declare them ‘not a threat’ to the public great but if not then keep them confined to mental facility until that person can be trusted not to relapse into the same behaviors. If it requires strict adherence to taking certain Rx drugs then they go to a halfway house to earn full freedom. We gotta stop leaving these guys loose in public until they commit an offense so severe that even woke lefty DA and Judges send them to prison.
“he pulled out a revolver”
“An NBC News team at the White House reported hearing between 20 and 30 gunshots”*
We NEED to do something about those Assault Revolvers.
*(from the immediately previous LI article)
Presumably almost all of those shots were from the police, not the nut case.
Maybe the police should practice more often. Unless he was running around and ducking behind cover it shouldn’t take 20-30 shots to bring someone down.
Many departments have virtually no firearms training.
When I resided in Portland OR decades ago, we had a joke about the Portland
Possum DeliveryPolice Department: when the annual shooting contests took place and it was the PPD’s turn, people BEHIND the firing line dove for cover.Oof, you can make a long list of police shootings with a much lower than 10% hit rate.
Have you ever heard the phrase “adrenaline dump”?
Shots #4-30 are called the activist judge shots. It was covered in the recently passed “Taxpayer Cost Reduction Act.”
Yes, Milhouse. The point being that the unwashed were almost certainly at way more risk from the actions of their “protectors” than they were from the original nutbag.
(The following is a table published in the March 1995 issue of Police magazine.)
Here’s a look at every bullet fired last year by New York City cops, as reported in the police department’s Firearms Discharge Assault Report:
TARGETS / SHOTS FIRED / HITS
At perpetrators / 928 / 173
At dogs / 155 / 111
Accidental discharges / 43 / 17
To protect other officer / 18 / 10
Police officer intoxicated / 10 / 0
Suicide / 8 / 8
Into locker / 6 / 0
At vehicle / 5 / 0
At girlfriend / 3 / 3
Attempting suicide / 3 / 2
Threatening suicide / 1 / 0
At wife / 1 / 1
At beer can / 1 / 0
100% accuracy rate v wives/girlfriends…hmmm.
Me, I’ve always wondered whether the 6/0 locker stat meant they all completely missed the locker. Or just that nobody was shot in the locker, which then raises the question of the beer can.
Ummm, this is a little sketch, in the defining-your-categories sort of way:
Suicide / 8 / 8
Attempting suicide / 3 / 2
Note that the number is “hits,” not “kills.”
So basically he was let out on society repeatedly because of a whole bunch of dumb.
Kind of thinking it was a good thing the press witnessed this. Maybe this will tickle a couple of brains into realizing the left isn’t worth carrying their water.
Yeah, I had a similar thought. When reporters are involved in a situation themselves they probably are more likely to connect some dots…or at least identify the dots. Sketchy dude with existing CT order to keep away routinely violates that order, despite mental issues he isn’t sent to inpatient treatment, is left roaming the streets till he finally shoots up the WH. There’s all sorts of threads to pull there to begin unraveling the lefty/woke tapestry woven into the d/prog narratives.
We can only hope. However, I think TDS runs deep there as well.
TDS comes from the inside out.
How long before the left wants to make him the new George Floyd? Perhaps erect some kind of statue or memorial near the WH for Nasire Best.
Wait, what? They did send their Best.
People are no longer Human
I look at him and see Clan of the Cave Bear.
Known to the SS on two occasions after being admonished by a judge to stay away from the WH. As if it was likely he would pay attention to the judge. Pathetic.
It would probably be a better world if crazy felons would pay attention to the admonishments of judges, and elected presidents didn’t.
One fewer Democrat.
Too bad. This guy could have been on the short list for the Netflix remake of Little Fauss and Big Halsy.