Maybe it's my suspicious nature, but I can't accept the outcome of the shooting in Pennsylvania as it currently stands. They are telling us a 20 year old with no military, or other training, was shooting at the President of the United States for unknown reasons. Thomas Matthew Crooks was a dietary assistant at a nursing home and also supposedly a registered member of the Republican Party..
His father legally purchased an AR-15 rifle in 2013 and had no knowledge of his son taking the gun to the GOP Rally.
Here is where it gets outside the realm of believability. Crooks was shooting from 130 yards from his target. In my time I never took a shot from that close. In basic training I put three shots in a target and all three holes in the target could be covered with a quarter...and that was from 150 yards with iron sights.
Crooks was atop the building on the far left and walked to several spots on the roof before his final selection. What? No member of the protection detail saw him?
I was an Army trained sniper in Vietnam and lesson one was to find a spot where you could fire down on your target at a 25 to 30 degree angle (Remember Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from the 5th floor of a building). Never do you want to shoot upwards, but sometimes an even plane will suffice. In combat you use what you have. With that thought in mind, why did the protection detail not cover that two-story building from the beginning. It's the only building in the area where the rally was held. From 130 yards he missed his target. Crooks was rejected from his high school rifle team because he was such a poor shot. Classmates have told authorities he was lucky to hit the paper targets. One shot skimmed the right ear of Trump and kept going. A former Fire Chief was hit and killed and two others were wounded, but now in stable condition.
The next time you view the shooting video, listen to the shots. Crooks' shots are higher pitched and are immediately followed by heavier sounding shots that killed Crooks. I find it a little hard to believe someone could located his target and engage it with that immediacy. Either the counter-sniper team was already aware of Crooks and bringing him into focus with their rifles, or maybe they were alerted by the number of people that saw Crooks on the roof with a rifle and shouting to law enforcement..
Bottom line: Thank goodness the former President is okay and plans to keep to his schedule at the RNC Convention this week.
Kudos to the Secret Service on the stage. When Trump dropped behind the podium two SS agents were covering him within two seconds...As Trump made his way to his escort caravan he waved a defiant fist in the air to let supporters know he was still a fighter. Look for some of that bloody footage to be in campaign ads as election day draws nearer.
After the shooting it didn't take long for the huge crowd to depart the rally..
The crowd had been estimated to be in excess of thirty thousand, but gun shots have a way of scattering people.
No comments:
Post a Comment