That was my first thought, too; indeed, I think assassin bullets are often packed to fire at subsonic speeds to prevent the telltale crack of a sonic boom.
However, such a system is still plausible, if it’s hooked to microphones in various locations. Bullets travel faster than sound, but not faster than electricity; if the sound wave hits a microphone, and the microphone triggers the barrier, it could conceivably get up before the bullet arrives.
I have no idea if it could work, but it’s an interesting idea.
As for the cowardice, there’s a wonderful story in Blood Done Sign My Name, in which the Klan is having a rally near Robeson County, NC (home of the Lumbee tribe). In the middle of the gun-wavin, Indian-killin (or at least Indian-killin-braggin) rally, somebody shot the lights out, and a bunch of war whoops erupted from the woods. A few of the local Lumbee youth totally routed the Klan with a prank attack. It was beautiful.
What part of “We’re going to try to kill Barack Obama and 102 other niggers.” did you not understand?*
Not Obama and 102 other people, whoever they may be. Not Obama and 102 early-birds at Lowenstein’s Luncheonette. Not Obama and 102 other guys in white tuxedos and top hats.
Notwithstanding the wackiness and disorganization of the plan as described and not an actual, direct quote, but still.
Robert Heinlein noted that “More than three people can’t agree on where to have dinner, let alone plan a revolution”.
You could set it to react to a flash of light of the wavelength (or mix thereof, anyway) of the light flash a gunshot, and thereby pick up only gunshots, rather than camera flashes. That’s theoretically possible. Deployment would be a bitch, though. I suppose if you can get anything in the way of a bullet, though, it’ll decrease the damage on impact.
EDIT: Left Hand of Dorkness also raises interesting points. I think some sniper rounds are designed to be subsonic, not assassin bullets specifically, though that’s a pure nitpick and reinforces your point.
That’s assuming it operates off of the sound of a gunshot. I don’t recall what the article on it said, and those details may have been deliberately inaccurate to make it that much harder for someone to figure out how to defeat the system.
I can’t think on any other way to work it. Perhaps you could discriminate between the sound of a gunshot and a car back fire with digital analysis. Sounds would vary on the caliber and distance. I would think that muzzle flash would vary again given caliber and lighting.
It’s been, hell, sixteen years, but I remember Clinton’s limo being followed down Louisiana street with a black SUV presumably full of SS guys.
A slight hijack; driving to work avoiding the road blocks in Little Rock while Clinton was running for President, I narrowly avoided a car with Tennessee plates going the wrong way down Center street, unknowingly headed directly for the Governor’s mansion. I wonder at the judgment of the Secret Service guys, not blowing this station wagon away.
What about radar? I’ve read claims that they can now resolve details down to the size of a raindrop. Don’t know if that’s true, but surely your typical high powered bullet is slightly larger than a raindrop. We also don’t know if they can set the gear up just “anywhere” or if the location has to have certain qualities about it. (Say, perhaps, indoors where the likelihood of a car backfiring would be unlikely to create a false positive.)
Are you sure Clinton was in the limo and not the SUV? Standard practice in high risk areas is to use decoy vehicles from what I understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used decoy motorcades in some places, with the media being fed misleading info.
Well, Clinton didn’t have quite the ire raised against him during the campaign that he acquired later on.
You’d also need to be toting a grenade-- they are the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives these days, you know. All the lovely ladies be crazy for HMX det cord.
“Hey baby, is that a pipe bomb in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
Their motto: ATF(&E!): We just keep getting more fucking awesome.
Next year, they plan on upgrading to “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Hookers.”
And if terrorists killed Bush while Cheney was in office, do you think we’d all just say, “Its a fair cop” and pack our bags and go home? No, we’d go in even more heavy handed than we are now.
So do you think the various terrorist groups in Iraq run around with signs around their necks announcing their affiliation with whichever group and who they’re planning on killing? :dubious:
Whatever the difficulty of discriminating a bullet from noise, flashbulbs or raindrops, the major difficulty seems to me to be calculating where the threat is coming from and moving a barrier up in time to deflect a bullet moving at 740 mph. I’d love to work on the control system, though.
Could be. We had just closed up the library and were walking to the parking lot. My fellow employees were cheering him, and I was yelling “Boo!” (I had issues with him over used car sales taxes including my house, which had tires on it) I began looking up at the surrounding buildings and wondered if there were SS snipers up there, and shut up.
So they’d have put in a lot of effort in order to stay in the same place. Why bother ?
Considering the kind of defenses involved, and his tendency to show up in safe zones without warning beforehand and then running off, I doubt he was in any more danger than I am sitting here. They can’t get away with killing someone just for getting out of a car in America like they do in Iraq. I doubt that any Iraqi who wasn’t vetted multiple times as a collaborator would be allowed to even see him from a distance without getting hosed down with gunfire.
The illustration I saw for the piece had multiple barriers coming up from different angles. I don’t think that in the early models (assuming its not just vaporware) they would bother trying to figure out where the bullet was coming from, just that one was coming. The additional shields would also provide a visual distraction, obscuring the President as the SS agents shoved him out of harm’s way.
Ah.
Actually, I think even Nancy Pelosi would back wider operations if Bush had gotten whacked in Iraq. You’ll note, however, I was responding to Der Trihs, who is not exactly what one would call “rational” when it comes to things like US military involvement in Iraq.
For the same reason they went after the WTC: To egg us on. The guys we’re fighting aren’t exactly what you’d call “sane.” I mean, anyone who’s idea of an afterlife involves virgins is, well, fucking stupid. Not to mention, instead of us turning tail and hiding, we promptly flattened two countries and yet they keep fighting us. You’d think that by now they’d learn Allah’s not on their side.
And do you think they’ll treat Obama any different here in the US?
No, but they can shut multiple interstates down for miles, run several different motorcades on seemingly random courses through a city, so that one has no idea which one is the right one, and they can (and probably will) give out false final destinations and arrival times.
And I doubt if they’re letting people get anywhere near Obama without being ran through a metal detector. He’s also probably wearing a bullet proof vest some of the time. Remember, Obama’s clearly not stupid, and he no doubt knows that there’s someone out there itching to put a bullet in him, and Obama knows what would happen to this country if that were going to happen. He’s not going to put himself at unnecessary risk if he doesn’t have to.
We’ve handed them victory after victory. They lost a disposable base in the form of Afghanistan, and Iraq was their ENEMY. And we crippled ourselves in the process. They have no need to “egg us on”, as long as we keep doing what they want.
