The part of the Secret Service that takes care of the President and the candidate(s) is a pretty small subset of that total. And probably the pretty well hand-picked better beans.
Claiming that an assassination attempt is was a false flag is like claiming that an election was stolen - you’ll need a lot of ironclad physical evidence to even get me to consider the possibility.
Also remember that not all of those 8,300 Secret Service agents are bodyguards. Some of them have purely administrative positions, and do things like setting the shift schedule, or calling up other agencies to make arrangements. And a lot of them are probably in the Secret Service’s other role, of catching counterfeiters.
I’m pretty sure @Kyomara was whooshing me. And yes, I’ve been having a little fun with my false flag conspiracy theory, in part because I’m a huge James Ellroy fan. But just hear me out:
- Trump would not have been in on it.
- If the attempt fails, it still gets Biden off the front page.
- If the attempt succeeds, it clears the way for a President Vance or someone equally despicable who’ll crush Biden and enact the 2025 Project without Trump screwing everything up.
But in reality I’m sure the gunman was a lone nut.
I’m just an armchair psychiatrist, but…
I’ve wondered if the shooter’s goal was suicide-by-police and he never planned to walk away, and if this boils down to issues with his gun fetishist father. By committing this deed, and then dying, he would forever brand his old man as the father of the guy who assassinated Trump, whom his father probably idolized.
Everything I’ve read thus far about this young man would seem to indicate there might have been Daddy issues at work here.
I’d take all of it with a grain of salt. If he was bullied, then all the bullies and the school that allowed it don’t look great now. I wouldn’t be surprised if after the fact nobody wants to acknowledge that. I’m not saying this IS the case, just that I wouldn’t be surprised.
When I was in High School there was a kid who was relentlessly bullied. But when he was killed in a car accident senior year, suddenly everyone loved him. The very people who were cruel to him every day were crying over his death. That left a lasting impression on me.
I’ve always found it odd that while most educated people know who John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were, even pretty smart people will be stumped if you ask them who Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz were. I am not sure which category Crooks would have fallen into.
Just a check on this. Do we know how many guns the father owned? Because a dozen or so shouldn’t tick the “fetishist” label. AIUI many, many gun owners have multiple guns, plus hundreds of rounds of ammo (if not thousands), but you never hear about the responsible ones who properly lock-up and store these things. The media seems to up-play the number of guns and amount of ammo, but I am not sure it’s unusual. I am not a gun owner, BTW and not defending the father in any way. Just looking for facts.
"I’d never seen anyone get bullied at Bethel Park High School really. … "
That’s one classmate I’m not going to believe for one second.
Seriously? 12 guns seems like a lot to me. Not that it’s unheard of or anything, but I’d say if you own 12 guns, you’re into guns. What’s the line to be a fetishist? I don’t know. I’d say 6.
He loses points because he didn’t succeed but makes them up because Trump’s fame (notoriety) has much longer legs than Garfield’s or McKinley’s
From what I recall of a National Geographic documentary (or something similar) a young agent who joins the Secret Service is assigned to counterfeit investigation duty to begin with, and can then try for a promotion to bodyguard duty after some years.
So in theory the agents guarding the President should be the cream of the crop.
The current president, perhaps. Maybe not so much a former president.
I’d say 3. Twelve seems like an insane number.
I have no inside information that gives me better insight than anyone else, but I have spent many years as a high level consultant to DOJ and USSS and am very familiar with their operations. For a while, I worked very closely with a man who was on presidential protective details for most of his career.
So, my take is this: The shooter was apparently a bit of a loner and outcast in school. Rejected by the rifle team, which explains the miss. Just what inspired him to climb a roof and shoot may never be known, but people who are isolated often become obsessed with something they build up in their own mind. Perhaps he thought he would be the ultimate “patriot” as Trump himself defined it? Did he think this would make him a hero? or just get noticed? My conjecture is that he was a dissappointed and disaffected Republican seriously stressed by the candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
I doubt he gave any of the outcome much thought. He might have expected to survive, but not much more. He must have done a bit of planning, to drive from his home with a rifle stolen from his father. We may find that he made a prior trip to scout the area and choose - or even prepare - his location. From that spot, a good marksman would have surely killed Trump. Consider what Lee Harvey Oswald did to JFK in a moving automobile. Thomas Crooks clearly “missed” his opportunity, despite multiple shots.
Could this be a publicity stunt set-up by Trump? That’s absurd for many reasons. If nothing else, there’s not a chance in hell that Mr. Bone Spur would arrange for a lousy marksman to shoot at his ear.
So, what about the Secret Service. I think they may have gotten a bit complacent, but more likely, simply overworked. Trump holds rallys all over the place in venues such as this, with wild crowds both pro and con. Each time, they have to go through the same extensive preparations to safeguard him. When dignitaries ride motorcades through DC, Secret Service even blocks the street drains along the route. Sooner or later, with all these rallies in varied locations, they are going to make a mistake and overlook something. And IF, coincidentally, someone like Crooks gets lucky and finds an opening, they’'ll get a rare chance at their target.
Conspiracy? No… just the result of mathematical probabilities. If you keep creating opportunities for a mistake, a mistake is bound to occur eventually.
Probably the same category that Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore ended up in. Hinckley is more remembered because of his obsession with a certain female celebrity.
Unless they’re Sondheim fans, of course.
That’s why I am asking. To a non-gun owner, one or two “seems” like enough and yeah six “seems” like a lot, but we need a few gun owners here on the board to chime-in.
You could try playing a round of golf with just one club. But you wouldn’t do very well.
One or two guns is pretty minimalist. Just for various hunting activities plus some target action on the side (for example), four or five guns is what you most likely have. If you have any collecting genes, a dozen adds up really fast.