National Guard troops deployed to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., have begun carrying firearms in an escalation of President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the nation’s capital.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued the directive authorizing the military to carry weapons, NBC News reported, citing a spokesperson for the local task force who said that not all of the National Guard members will be armed, only those who are “supporting safety and security.” NBC News went on to report:
The majority of the guard members will carry M17 pistols, their service-issued weapons, a Defense Department official with knowledge of the planning said, while a small number of the troops will be armed with their service M4 rifles. The troops are authorized to use their weapons for self-protection and ‘as a last resort’ in response to an ‘imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm,’ the federal task force said.
More than 2,000 National Guard troops from several states, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, have been patrolling the nation’s capital since Trump issued the order two weeks ago.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told News Nation on Thursday that D.C. is “more violent than Baghdad.”
In response, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC that “any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false” and that the city is not experiencing a spike in crime. Violent crime for the year to date is down nearly 26%, compared with 2024, according to D.C. police data.
Bowser declined to comment on the latest development involving firearms.
Last week in a news conference in the Oval Office, Trump threatened to deploy National Guard troops to other cities, like Chicago and New York. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said on X that as of Friday, he had not received any offer of assistance from the federal government and that he had made no request for federal intervention. He wrote, “The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the @IL_Natl_Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.” He accused Trump of trying to “manufacture a crisis.” Immediately after Trump’s threat, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson rejected the president’s approach to public safety, calling it in a statement “uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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