Kook on Roof 1, Secret Service and Police 0
July 14th, 2024Fire Them All
I guess everyone is talking about the same thing today. Trump was finally shot.
I’m amazed it didn’t happen sooner. He has more enemies than John Wick.
I found out a few minutes after it happened. I saw that there had been some kind of problem at a rally, and I watched the video. He reached up to his right ear and grimaced in pain, and then he ducked. It was obvious something had struck him.
The left-wing coverage was appalling from the start. An early CNN headline said Trump fell. They must have been high-fiving in the room where that deliberate libel was written. “Finally, we can say the other guy fell.” Trump burst onto the scene as a candidate nearly a decade ago, and he has not fallen once. When will they quit with the false equivalence?
They knew he didn’t fall. They didn’t care. They had a chance to tell a lie, so they took it, not thinking about the way it would age during the next century or even over the next hour. Other liars in the MSM took the same low road. They don’t even try these days.
We now know a bullet went through his right ear. It was fired by a nut named Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was a registered Republican who also donated money to Act Blue, a far-left organization. The MSM played up the “registered Republican” thing, exactly the same way they never play up the “black male” thing when street crimes are committed by black males.
Leftists often register as Republicans so they can cheat and queer (sorry) our primaries.
Let’s look at the evidence in totality, as we now know it. Republican. Donated to Act Blue. Tried to kill a Republican president at a Republican rally. Also killed a person attending the rally and wounded at least two others. Yeah, the two seconds he spent checking the “R” box when indicating his affiliation really outweigh the other stuff.
Photos show a man with a woman’s hairstyle and geeky feminine eyeglass frames no normal conservative would wear.
Another thing: he couldn’t shoot. He shot from a prone position at 150 yards, using a rifle resembling an AR-15. That would be a 4-MOA rifle at worst, unless it was a complete piece of junk, and prone shooting is the easiest way to get precision. At 150 yards, 1 MOA is about 1.6″, so 4 MOA is 6.4″. How wide is Trump? Maybe 18″ when facing you at an angle? Crooks missed the center of mass by about that much, the only time he hit Trump. The other shots hit other people, so they were even worse.
A conservative would be less likely to be a terrible shot. Let me shoot at another person from 150 yards from the prone position, with a good gun I practice with, and he has nearly no chance of being missed. And I’m not all that good.
Crooks shot from a roof, meaning he was higher than his victims. Shooting downward is easier than making level shots because it reduces the bullet drop.
Crooks was wearing a T-shirt from the popular Youtube gun channel Demolition Ranch. I’m familiar with it. A rich veterinarian runs it. He does silly things like deliberately putting the wrong ammunition in guns and then firing them. I’m sure his fans are mostly conservative, but I don’t think the shirt makes Crooks conservative. It seems more likely he wore it to embarrass us. More than Demolition Ranch does.
Maybe Crooks really was conservative, and he was just mentally ill. So far, it appears unlikely. If he really is conservative, we’ll just have to admit it.
My best guess is that he is either on the trans spectrum, sympathetic to Hamas, or both.
I haven’t gotten to the real story yet. The real story is this: the Secret Service and the police organizations that worked the event are incompetent.
Sixty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and John Connally from an elevated position. He used a mail-order military surplus rifle, and he still got impact with two out of three shots. Clearly, the Secret Service has learned absolutely nothing since then. They let a man climb onto a white roof in broad daylight, carrying a rifle, and shoot a former president a couple of Frisbee throws away.
If I wanted to shoot Joe Biden, I wouldn’t try. I have–well…had–an inflated sense of the competency of the Secret Service. Before the Trump shooting, I would have expected to have to deal with drones, facial recognition, and only God knows what other clever tools designed to protect presidents. It would never have occurred to me that they might let me climb onto a building a few yards away, unmolested, and fire at will.
A single drone flying around the event would have picked up the sniper. Agents on foot with binoculars would have spotted him. There must be a number of computerized surveillance systems that would have picked him up, had they been used. The Secret Service and the police didn’t think of these things, but I, an old untrained guy in a recliner, did.
The government loves to say, “See something? Say something.” There was no system in place to help people say things to the Secret Service. Witnesses saw the sniper as he took several minutes to climb onto the roof and get settled. They waved their arms at the Secret Service and yelled at the police. There was no hotline they could use. The Secret Service and police ignored them. They allowed Trump to walk into an ambush dozens of people already knew about.
People are saying the Secret Service saved Trump. Never happened. Bad aim saved Trump. A round hit his ear, he heard it and felt pain, and he ducked behind the podium, which–please tell me this is true–must have been reinforced to resist gunfire. The Secret Service let him get shot, and then they reacted when he was already safe.
If Donald Trump gave a talk in my pasture, and I had to protect him myself on a thousand-dollar budget, you better believe I would find a way to reinforce his podium.
Anyone who says the Secret Service saved people is forgetting Corey Comperatore, the man whose brains were splattered by the assassin as he shielded his wife and daughter. They’re forgetting the two (at least) other people who were shot.
The Secret Service is a disgrace, not because it failed, but because it made an effort Barney Fife would have been ashamed of. It did not provide basic protection from a known threat. If you do a good job and fail, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Letting people with rifles climb onto roofs near a Trump rally is something completely different.
We and Trump’s family nearly got stuck with everlasting video of Trump’s brain and skull spraying all over about 30 rally attendees. We were spared not by an inch but by half an inch. That could have happened. Today, we could be watching one blurred video after another. We could be seeing photos of people with Trump’s blood and brains on their shirts and faces. Leftists would have made animated GIF’s to make each other laugh. Far worse than the Zapruder film. The Secret Service put us in this position.
I don’t know if it’s possible for the victims and their families to sue the Secret Service. I wish it were. The Secret Service deserves an embarrassing series of televised trials, and it deserves a bunch of firings.
People are saying the Secret Service is too busy with DEI to do a good job. I wouldn’t doubt it. A woman runs the show. A woman who has never been physically capable of doing everything an agent should be able to do. You have to wonder how many tee-ball hires they have.
Another person who deserves public shaming: Representative Bernie Thompson, an black Democrat who sponsored a deplorable bill that would strip convicted felons sentenced to prison of Secret Service protection. I’ll bet he’d want agents around his sorry butt if he had to mingle with the general population in a penitentiary. He wouldn’t want to depend on corrections officers. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer and Whitey Bulger.
As of this moment, the Secret Service is a loser agency and a laughingstock. Someone needs to go through it like Hercules went through the Augean stables before Biden gets his head blown off while trying to find his way off a stage. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing to add to America’s history?
As for Trump, I am very impressed. When you’re shot and wounded badly, you may not know it right away. Many people in Trump’s situation would have panicked and even cried. Many would have refused to stand back up. Trump got up, faced the cameras with blood on his cheek and the side of his head, insisted on getting his shoes, and then pumped his fist three times and yelled, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That was great. He turned being shot into his greatest campaign triumph.
AP photographer Evan Vucci, who will be famous by mid-week, got a picture of Trump gesturing defiantly with our flag waving above his head in front of a deep blue sky. That picture will live forever. I promise you, it’s on T-shirts right now. I want one, even though I’m not as excited about Trump as many Republicans.
That photo is Trump’s Marines-on-Iwo-Jima shot. I feel like blowing it up and putting it on my living room wall.
I knew Trump was impervious to stress, but I had no idea how deep it ran. He is a marvel.
The Secret Service needs to be fixed, as does its reputation. Today, tens of thousands of nutjobs who used to be afraid of the Secret Service are suddenly wondering if they gave it too much credit. We need to make criminals afraid of the Secret Service again, fast.
I look forward to seeing a bunch of Secret Service and police officials roasted alive for this debacle. Their organizations need some tough love. If the Secret Service isn’t reformed, no one they allegedly protect will be safe. I hope a lot of useless people are humiliated and forced into retirement by September.
July 14th, 2024 at 3:33 PM
[…] Steve Graham. […]
July 14th, 2024 at 5:20 PM
I don’t know about the podium, but the bunting in front of the stage is supposed to hide armor and the telepromptors are protective.
The kid’s former schoolmates say he was a loner who was bullied badly. He wore camo pants and a civic mask long after everyone else quit wearing them.
The entire final chapter of the Warren Report is about the failures of the Secret Service. They have learned nothing.
July 14th, 2024 at 11:27 PM
A relative of mine, who is in his 70’s is a hardcore democrat. Said something to the effect today that he wasnt at all surprised this didnt happen sooner (Trump shooting) because of what Trump says. Smiling and totally excused it as no big deal.
Got into an argument with him today after he said, with a straight face that they now sell guns everywhere, even at flea markets and swap meets and no background checks required. Ever. He followed up with “the democrats tried to stop this a couple years ago but the republicans shot it down.” Complete demented fantasy and there is no talking to this man. Nothing he says is even remotely true and he is 100% confident that he is right. I dont know if he makes this stuff up himself or hears it from lefty websites.