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One-hundred and fifty yards. The United States Secret Service allowed a shooter to fire at former president Donald Trump from an elevated position at 150 yards.
Yes, that former president Trump … you remember him: The most controversial, hated presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln. If threat levels for politicians were ranked from 1-10 by the Secret Service, surely Trump would be an 11.
Allow me to give you a little insight into what a breathtaking failure this was: If you were to go to a rifle range, you’d see 150 yards is just beyond “the beginner distance.” In an hour, I could teach someone who’s never held a rifle to hit a man-sized target at 150 yards.
When the Marine Corps got through training me in marksmanship, I could hit a man-sized target at 500 yards… ten out of ten times … using just the “iron sites” the M-16 came with. No scope.
Competitive marksmen shoot and hit — without a scope — man-sized targets 1,000 yards away.
For military snipers using scopes, kills at 1-mile have become common. That’s 17.6 football fields. In 2023, a Ukrainian sniper had a confirmed kill at 2.3 miles. I mention this, because a trained professional assassin could’ve hit President Trump at those distances.
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RELATED | WOULD-BE TRUMP ASSASSIN IDENTIFIED
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None of this is new or surprising to the U.S. Secret Service: Elevated positions, the effective range of a various rifles, where a shooter could be hidden … the existence of the Secret Service protection details revolves around the question, “Where could a shooter be hiding?”
When president Joe Biden speaks at an outdoor venue, the Secret Service procedures would likely entail securing, with human eyes, every potential shooting position within 1,000 yards. In a case like the open farmland where Trump was speaking, it would likely be more than 1,000 yards.
On its face, here’s the worst thing about this disaster: Remember that trained, professional military sniper? Who can kill a man from 17.6 football fields away? Yeah, that’s how far away the Secret Service should have things locked down. Why? Because those trained snipers aren’t using triple-ninja humpback growler weapons … they’re using gear you could buy and modify yourself. (I hasten to add you aren’t going to hit the target at 2.3 miles without very specialized gear, but kills at a mile have become common).
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“They were looking at us the whole time we were standing by that tree …”
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Okay, so the Secret Service failed in the very worse way possible. They failed to do even the basics of their job, much like an accountant using the minus tab when adding numbers. Can anything make this worse?
Oh, yeah. A group of civilians saw the shooter low-crawling up the roof. And he was so close to them they could see he was doing so with a rifle. On an interview with BBC, one of them stated his group began yelling and pointing out the shooter to both police and the Secret service, and that the shooter was within 50-feet of them.
“We were pointing at him and yelling,” the BBC interviewee said. “The police were running around down there on the ground — we’re like Hey, Man! There’s a guy on the roof with a rifle — and the police were like huh? What? Like they didn’t know what was going on. I was pointing at him for 2-3 minutes, and the Secret Service was looking at us from the top of the barn. They were looking at us the whole time we were standing by that tree.”
There’s more: Get a load of the map showing the buildings. A six-year-old proficient in the video game Call of Duty could point to the spot the sniper used and identify it as the best place to shoot from.
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Best aerial pic I've seen yet, via @nypost pic.twitter.com/cjSNFjX5OC
— Jonathan Martin (@jmart) July 14, 2024
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In the wake of the shooting, I suppose it’s worth at least noting a recent piece of legislature offered by the rat Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the former chair of the Jan 6th committee. His brilliant non-partisan idea was to deny Secret Service protection to those who have been convicted of a federal or state felony that carries a minimum one-year prison term. The proposed bill was called the “Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED) Former Protectees Act.
Fortunately for Trump – and Hunter Biden – it didn’t pass.
One of Thompson’s staffers, incidentally, took to Facebook shortly after the assassination attempt.
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The attempted assassination, of course, has brought out plenty of other lunatics and idiots.
“I do want to say there was one thing that when I watched the tape, I found odd because of all of the heated rhetoric, and that is after he was hit, former president Trump got up and said, ‘fight, fight, fight,'” CNN’s weekend idiot Jamie Gangel observed. “I think what we’re hearing from people is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to tamp it down.”
Uh, Jamie? If you want to know the real message telegraphed by Trump’s badass reactions, it would be, “Donald J. Trump will be our next President.”
The Twitter trolls are also out in force, with liberal extremists attacking the shooter for missing, while conservative extremists are launching death threats against the legacy media.
The FBI has been tasked with investigating the shooting. Boy, that gives me a feeling of confidence; those guys love Trump. Plus, they’d never do anything to cover for their fellow deep-staters.
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YOU: What??? Prioleau, are you saying the FBI would shirk its duties? Act in an unprofessional manner?
ME: Hell yeah, I am. After the FBI conspired to prevent Trump from winning the Presidency, then spent four years attempting to have him thrown out of office with a Russia-collusion story they knew for a fact was bullshit because THEY made it up, I’m pretty sure they established their new forever-brand. The FBI leadership is nothing but a bunch of dirty cops who went to law school.
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Ultimately, the “investigation” will say that — through no fault of their own — the Secret Service was “undermanned” that day.
I wonder how many people will be fired?
When the Marine Corps experienced a tragic accident in AAVs (assault amphibious vehicles) that killed several men a few years ago, they subsequently fired: The vehicle crew chief; the section leader; the platoon sergeant; the platoon commander; the AAV company commander (who wasn’t with 1,000 miles), the infantry CO of troops (who knows nothing about AAVs); the CO of the ship; the MEU commander; and the commanding general of the division.
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I’m guessing the investigation will offer up the solution that we need to cough up more entitlement dollars, so all illegal aliens can go to law school, and become FBI agents one day.
As I’ve written before, I absolutely believe a number of the conspiracy theories the Left laughs at are true: The Covid vax, Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, the burning of Maui, the murder of JFK and MLK, Jr, Epstein’s “suicide,” mail-in ballot fraud, the pipe bomb outside the DNC, the presence of federal agitators at Jan 6th … I believe these because I also believe in evidence I can see, read, and hear … oh, and Occam’s Razor.
But let’s say you believe only one conspiracy theory, ever. Just one.
What does this episode lead you to believe?
If you were watching an NFL game, and the QB threw an interception on first down every single play, and the coach never took him out of the game, and the score ended up 107 to 0, what would you think? That’s how bad this is.
What transpired here is simply beyond the pale. At least a dozen agents would have had to make grossly-incompetent decisions … all at the same time … in violation of every minute of training and experience they’ve ever had.
Is that possible? Yes, it is. I do not yet believe this was a real conspiracy, yet. But it sure as hell quacks like a duck.
BANNER VIA: GETTY IMAGES
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Prioleau Alexander is a freelance writer, focusing mostly on politics and non-fiction humor. He is the author of four books: ‘You Want Fries With That?,’ ‘Dispatches Along the Way,’ ‘Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?‘ and ‘They Don’t Call It The Submission Process For Nothing.’
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10 comments
When are Republicans going to answer for conservative-on-conservative crime plaguing their community? First an angry mob tried to hang VP Mike Pence, now a right wing gunman tries to shoot their former Pres. We all know Republicans glorify violence by taking photos of them holding weapons, talking about their “come and take them” wet dreams… Remember Sarah Palin’s crosshairs ad? Remember that Republican guy in NC, who said “Some folks need killing” in a church of all places?
Republican “culture” is nothing but violence and death.
Hey Captain Kneejerk: we don’t know the shooter’s politics…on one hand there are reports that he registered as a Republican a two years ago, and in others that donated money to an “ACT Blue” type PAC…and it is well known that in Pennsylvania there are open primaries (like here in SC) and therefore there are some folks who “cross over” to vote for someone they would rather see as an opponent against their preferred candidate. No one ever actually tried to hang Mike Pence – some unknown folks (who oddly have never been found) built a makeshift prop to look like a gallows.
Here’s what I remember….
A Bernie Sanders campaign worker showed up to a ballfield in DC in 2017 with a machine gun and attempted to massacre the entire delegation of 20+ Republicans who were there; he had to be shot and killed to stop him;
Another leftist Democrat weirdo travelled across the country to attempt to murder a Supreme Court Justice about a year ago and was arrested just a short distance from said Justice’s home;
Another Republican congressman was on a campaign stage in New England about two years ago and a deranged democrat attempted to knife him;
Literally five days before Trump got shot Biden said that Trump needed to be in a “bullseye;”
The list goes on, but you get the gist. Derp.
Ultra-leftwing, liberal blogger Brad Warthen, who is a straight party Democrat over is a registered Republican. He knows that voting Democrat in SC is a waste of time so he registered as a Republican to vote against the popular candidates. He has admitted it on his blog several times.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/homeowner-who-lives-next-to-trump-rally-site-describes-free-for-all-with-no-security-214836293757
Prioleau this was another great article! I enjoy all of your articles and look forward to reading more of them. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and above all Thank You for your service to this country.
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Trump is literally the most obvious and sought after target in the world right now. Had the shooter hit him, our country would have been thrown into civil unrest and chaos. They exposed us ALL to danger by allowing this to happen. I am disgusted.
Occam’s Razor has a well-earned reputation for a reason ……
The beginning of your article was interesting and informative, then it kind of fizzled out into conspiratorial “La La Land.” And as for Occam’s Razor, I’ve “parsed out” quite a few, but I think that I will stay with my Gillette.
Republicans still making the argument that libs can register Republican too keep discounting the fact that this guy was very conservative throughout school.
People on the left and right need to remember that there are some people out there who are just crazy…or have personal, nonpolitical reasons for their actions. Ronald Reagan’s shooter for example just wanted to impress an actress that he was obsessed with. The guy that shot Teddy Roosevelt thought that President McKinley’s ghost was telling him to do it. McKinley was shot by a guy who had lost his job in a prior national financial crisis and had turned to being an anarchist (so it was kind of both personal and political). The bottom line is we are only getting bits and pieces of this and proclaiming the shooter’s true motivations at this point is premature. Hopefully this guy left a manifesto around somewhere- that seems to be their preferred delusional, grandious way of leaving this world.