Qualla: 2010 Pentagon shooting

2010 Pentagon shooting: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He looked like every other commuter at the end of a long Pentagon workday. Dark business suit. Calm face. The kind of person Pentagon Force Protection officers see a thousand times an evening. At 6:40 p.m. on March 4, 2010, John Patrick Bedell walked up to the security checkpoint outside the Pentagon Metro station, and when officers Jeffrey Amos and Marvin Carraway asked to see his credentials, he drew a 9mm semiautomatic from his pocket and opened fire. The exchange that followed lasted less than a minute. A third officer ran in to help. The three of them put Bedell down with a head wound from which he would not recover. Amos and Carraway were wounded and would be released from George Washington University Hospital within hours. Bedell was 36 years old, held a physics degree from UC Santa Cruz, was enrolled in graduate electrical engineering at San Jose State, and had spent the past several years writing a libertarian blog about Murray Rothbard and the September 11 attacks. He had told no one he was coming to Washington.

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2010 Pentagon shooting: Less Than a Minute

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Pentagon Metro station sits beneath one of the most heavily defended buildings in the world. The checkpoint where Bedell was challenged that night was outside the secured perimeter, where Force Protection officers check credentials of anyone trying to enter the building throu...

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2010 Pentagon shooting: A Resume Without Pattern

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Bedell grew up in Hollister, California, a town of about 35,000 in San Benito County between the coastal range and the Salinas Valley. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1994 with an undergraduate physics degree, then drifted - a year of biochemistry at San Jose Stat...

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2010 Pentagon shooting: The Sabow Theory

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One thread ran through Bedell's writing in the months before the attack: the 1991 death of Marine Corps Colonel James E. Sabow at his quarters at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California. The official ruling on Sabow's death was suicide. A small but persistent community...

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2010 Pentagon shooting: Categories That Do Not Fit

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the days after the shooting, journalists tried to fit Bedell into a familiar political frame and could not. The Christian Science Monitor noted that he was a registered Democrat who had been anti-Bush, but argued it would be facile to call him left-wing. He had also embraced a...

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