A spray of bullets may have only grazed Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, but they killed one rally attendee and critically wounded two others.
They have also torn through the 2024 presidential campaign, damaging the social and cultural fabric of the nation. The illusion of security and safety in American politics – built over decades - has
I hate that this is the new narrative, like violence against political opponents is a new thing in this country. Obama survived MULTIPLE assassination attempts. Bill Clinton and George Bush both survived multiple assassination attempts. Sectarian violence has been a thing in this country since its inception. The fact that the secret service failed to do their due diligence at policing the buildings surrounding Trump’s latest rallies doesn’t somehow mean that sectarian violence has reached some momentous peak. It simply means that people didn’t do their jobs properly. Maybe because, like, why would they? I know that if I was a secret service agent assigned to the duty of watching after Trump, I wouldn’t be particularly committed to the task. Maybe they felt the same way.
Edit: Here’s the NY Times image of the vicinity surrounding the Trump rally. Why the fuck wasn’t that place watched by the Secret Service? Any competent agency looking to protect someone would have 100% had agents watching that building.
I literally can’t bring myself to respond to anything else you’ve said here because I clicked the Wikipedia link for assassination attempts on Obama, and learned that there was a plot to kill him with a Death Ray, and the leader of the group had actually constructed a partially working x-ray beam generator theoretically capable of delivering lethal doses of radiation over long distances.
Yeah; the FBI were doing undercover operations with them for 15 months before arresting them. I don’t know any more details of the case than the wikipedia article highlights, but surely you’d have enough evidence to arrest people trying to build a death ray at some point prior to 15 months. Maybe our gov’t just thought that their innovation was useful and figured they’d wait and see where they went with it.
They probably thought a death ray was total bullshit until suddenly it wasn’t
Why would they pass up free R&D on a potential death ray?
How is that not something that a lot more people know? That’s nuts.
Did the secret service allow this? In the TMZ video of the return fire, it looks like the sniper on the roof was already aiming at the shooter well before he shot. And only after he shot did the sniper take him out.
Maybe coincidence…but seeing this level of incompetence from the secret service makes this whole thing seem very very fishy.
The secret service are cops and ACAB holds as true as it always does.
But if the secret service had shot first it would be a VERY different news story. And while all the youtubes about how amazing the secret service are from former SS officers who now run private security firms talk about their training and planning… politics is their first priority. An SS officer who pulls out an uzi to protect a fallen president is one thing. An SS officer who pulls out an uzi to unload on someone who “might have a gun” is a very different story.
Yeah, but that guy definitely had a gun. It’s not as if one could easily conceal an A.R. 15 while sprawled on a rooftop.
It was kind of a perfect storm that is going to change how basically every protective force maintains security.
The shooter was (allegedly?) 130 something meters away.
Snipers are generally focused on distances greater than 150 meters. So it would be the guys with assault rifles who are responsible for targets within that radius. Their optics are going to heavily favor closer ranges and people (who play call of duty) very much overestimate just how good of a view you get through those optics. You have more than enough clarity to aim for a center mass shot or even a headshot but you aren’t making out fine grain details.
So you have someone who has a large “something”. Maybe you are hearing “it is a gun” from eyewitnesses but eyewitnesses are morons. So you have people squinting and trying to get a clear picture through fairly close range optics and trying to figure out if that is a rifle or a camera on a tripod or what. Because the people with “sniper scopes”? If they pivot to look at the shooter then they are now ignoring what they are ACTUALLY supposed to be watching and… that is a known tactic.
So you have secret service squinting while people are sprinting to go storm the building. Because even if it is a gunman, the best case scenario is to capture them alive so that the speech is not disrupted and you have zero risk of executing a civillian.
Did anyone even scatter when the gunfire went off? Thats a lot of shots. From the clips I’ve seen they stare.
I noticed that, too, but I just chalk that up to people freezing (fight, flight, freeze).
I can’t see where they would exit/move
The easy explanation is that literally zero of the people on video have ever been shot at before. So you can see the crowd not react, trump himself barely reacts. Then the crowd panics once they realize but most of them are older and have no where to go. The security also makes a big show of tackling Trump and they all fixate on watching that instead of running.
So yeah it’s just everyday panic
Every other video of a gun going off unexpectedly around a large group of people results in mass panic and and people immediately acting/running/stampeding in some cases. This video looks unnatural.
Honestly it could’ve been a variety of factors. The gun shots came from 300 yards away (from early reports I’ve read). Meaning that the sound will be greatly diminished by that time. And I do see the crowd panic but again, they’re older. And slow. They also have no idea what to do because they can’t locate the fire. I think the guards that rushed in stopped a lot of them from leaving or going anywhere since they assumed the shots came from the crowd. I mean a minute after the shots you see guards with guns pointing into the crowd.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a crowd freeze like this especially while seated. Humans are weird but if you’re standing, you flee. If you’re seated, you’re trapped and panic and freeze.
I can tell you right now, I would’ve sat there frozen. No where to go, no cover to find, armed guards rushing in, return fire happening, etc.
Don’t know where everyone is seeing 300 yards. I read 300 feet right off, and that looks spot on.
Trump chose his secret service detail based on loyalty, not competence.
I feel like there’s a difference between stopping and assassination plot and stopping an assassination attempt.
Sounds like this kid did it all on his own. Harder to stop a plot when you don’t tell anyone.