You’re a Secret Service counter sniper. You’ve spent thousands of hours looking through your scope, and nothing ever happens. Your protectee is in the middle of a speech, just like all the other speeches. Today you’ll add 60 minutes to that tally of thousands of hours.
Suddenly somebody’s head crests a roof 150 yards away.
How many seconds do you wait before shooting them?
Well, do they have a gun? Maybe, but maybe it’s a local trying to get a good photo. “Secret Service kills beloved local photography student from 150 yards away”, that’ll be a good headline. Maybe it’s one of the local cops covering that area. You don’t have direct comms with them. This former cop says that Secret Service was a few seconds away from shooting a friendly SWAT unit at the G8 summit back in 2004.
The optimal answer is definitely not “wait for them to fire first, that way you know their intent”, but anyone who tells you the optimal answer is easy just hasn’t thought about it very hard.
Disclaimer: we have no idea yet what actually happened. Maybe the countersnipers were staring at the would-be assassin for minutes and didn’t take a shot because of silly bureaucracy. It seems increasingly likely there was severe institutional incompetence here. The point is just that even if you could assume that the institution is perfectly competent, this stuff would still be hard.
There’s a lesson here for gun owners and self-defenders. Training, drills, and research are critical, but real life is always going to be messy. Find training that forces you to think quickly in real time, but build situational awareness so that you can avoid the real-life situations that put you in that position.
— Open Source Defense in Takeaways from the assassination attempt
Of everything that was weird and questionable about that event that sniper seemed to have a genuine oh shit moment and handled business with the next heartbeat. Dunno if there were visual obstructions between the crawl path and spot where the would be assassin popped up but I am assuming it was a quick decision from detection.
There was a visual obstruction between the sniper’s position and the shooter until the shooter made himself visible while taking the shots at Trump. It was the ridge line of the building he was on. The problem is as more videos come out the shooter was on that roof for approximately 26 minutes before taking the shots at Trump. Numerous people can be seen and heard yelling to LE and other security personnel about there being someone on the roof with a firearm. That same building had previously been designated as a potential security risk in the pre planning stages of the event, because of it’s line of sight to the stage where President Trump was to speak and yet there was no one on the roof as security. The Secret Service is claiming it was outside their Protective Perimeter. This incident was this generations ‘Grassy Knoll’ and the only difference is this time it failed.
Well there is one other difference in various instant media that can share information, theories, and expertise outside the total control of government and their owners. We will see if it matters.
“Well, do they have a gun? Maybe, but maybe it’s a local trying to get a good photo. “Secret Service kills beloved local photography student from 150 yards away”, that’ll be a good headline.”
Whoever decided 150 yards away was ‘outside the security area’ will have some explaining to do, but I suspect the answer will be “we asked for additional security from the Secret Service, but were denied over and over again”.
20 plus minutes up there and no communication between the ‘local yokels’ and the SS?
“Secret Service kills beloved local photography student from 150 yards away”
Where there is a high profile person with Secret Service agents around, that beloved photography student would be a complete Fkn idiot for trying a stunt like that. If that student was killed, it would their own fault for lacking common sense.
The Biden administration is doing all they can to breed conspiracy theories over this. They will try to use these later to discredit anyone not toeing the political lune.
If the SS knew there was a plot from Iran to get Trump and others, and they increased security, then a 20 year old geek bypassed all this increased security, what would have a well trained, well funded and highly motivated agent of Iran been able to do?