If you don't know someone took a shot a former President Donald Trump yesterday, doing only minor damage to him, killing an innocent bystander and injuring at least two others, then you have been living under a rock well past the last trolleycar stop.
The TV and online talking heads were on it nonstop after it happened, mostly reporting the basic facts listed above and admitting they didn't know anything more. The shots came from an apparently unsecured rooftop overlooking the venue, and that -- as so far reported -- is a significant failure.
I have worked engineering support for TV reporting from a Presidential candidate appearance, though with smaller crowds. I'm not going to get into any detail, but the U. S. Secret Service doesn't kid around. They identify the sources of risk and they get them under control. There are locations where they've asked utilities to weld down manhole covers along the route of a motorcade. Their normal, known way to deal with vantage points is to put their own person with a gun up there, or get a cooperating agency to do so. Did they miss this one? Did the individual(s) assigned to it get sneaked past, taken out, distracted? I don't know. We may not ever know.
What we do know is the dizzy-minded of every stripe are fabulating; online, I have heard everything from accusations of a "Reichstag fire moment" to "a Leftist plot foiled." It's nonsense. Not that knowing so will stop the firehose of BS, but it's all wind.
The first claim is easy to disprove: nobody's that good a shot, not with a bobbing, weaving, gesticulating target. At the reported distance, under the known circumstances, no one could pull off a near-miss of that nature on purpose, period. And without a Number Two already in place, ready to step up and wave the bloody shirt, no even semi-sane conspiracy would take that risk.
The other extreme is harder to debunk, but the historical examples (with one or two possible exceptions*) show that it takes a lunatic to get by the security around Presidents and Presidential candidates. From Richard Lawrence's attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835 through the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, the attempts on former President Theodore Roosevelt, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and president Truman,* the assassination of President John Kennedy and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy to attempts on Presidents Ford (two) and Reagan, only people adrift from reality have been unpredictable enough to bring the means of doing harm within range of Presidents and Presidential candidates, at least within U. S. boundaries. Nearly all of them have acted as "lone gunmen." Plotters plot and all plots leak, without exception. It only takes one Smedley Butler, only one cinematographer with a longer lens and better microphone† than plotters realize, one disaffected member of the group, one misdirected message, one nosy reporter. And both FBI and the Secret Service are listening; researching for this post, I was impressed by the number of attempts they have foiled. There's zero likelihood of a plot.
It is, I am almost sorry to tell you, "the usual noise in here." Having sown political violence -- and our history shows it is always lurking -- the harvest followed. Keeping the civility in civil society requires constant effort from each of us, and we haven't been doing a very good job of it in recent years. My sympathies are with the victims, as are the sympathies of any decent person.
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* John Wilkes Booth was (arguably) sane and part of a wider plot; the Puerto Rico nationalists who murdered their way to within shooting distance of President Truman may have been fanatical but had no history of insanity.
† Perhaps I shouldn't point this out, but the power switches on many wireless microphone transmitters are lousy and, worse, talent has a habit of turning them off and then forgetting to turn them back on, so the switches are very often bypassed.
I agree that it was a lone nut. I’m also dismayed by the apparent failure to secure that rooftop. There are many questions but the answers might be slow in coming.
ReplyDeleteStill being within 72 hours of the event, I'm still processing information and awaiting developments.
ReplyDeleteAnd quoting the EMA Mantra "First Reports Are Always Wrong".
People prefer the idea that events are under human agency- even a malign human agency- over the thought that much of this is random.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the whole Dunning-Kruger thing of taking the scraps of information and making some sort of narrative to prove that our view of the world is right, because we hate to admit that we don't actually know stuff. Most of the people saying stuff about the incident aren't part of the incident. Those who were part of the incident don't know all the stuff about the incident. And those who are actually investigating the incident aren't supposed to be talking about it outside of official channels, as it's an active investigation.