That would never work, it is a completely different situation than the Breivik attacks, who set up a bomb in Oslo to distract the police from an attack in the island of Utøya. As soon as a bomb blows up close to where Trump (or any other protected person) is, he is taken away and shielded. I am not saying he did not plan it that way: he seems to have been dim, deluded and/or plain confused. Just saying it was a stupid plan.
I don’t believe that is covered by the second amendment and nobody discussed collecting bombs, but I won’t stop you.
I suspect the only “plan” he had was to create some kind of mayhem. He improvised excellently having discovered an inexplicably unsecured rooftop and getting off multiple rounds, one of which grazed one of the most famous and protected people in the world. Deluded he may well have been, but you can’t deny that he was smart enough to quickly discover an opportunity and exploit it.
We don’t know whether he’d scouted out that rooftop in advance, and was just lucky enough to find nobody up there ahead of him. He might have assumed there wouldn’t be anybody, if he was assuming he’d have a chance of escaping.
I think that a piece of significant counterevidence to the “politically unsophisticated random nutcase” theory, though, is the timing of the attack, just a couple days before the opening of the convention. It really couldn’t have been more perfectly calculated to throw the GOP into complete disarray; can you even imagine what a horrific shitshow that convention would have been, with dozens of sociopathic hyenas competing to take the most extreme positions possible?
Good news! There’s a video game with that premise. It’s called “Nice Shot”.
I think it’s possible he hadn’t fully committed yet and was leaving himself the option to back out. Thus his telling his boss he’d be back on Sunday - if he decided at the last minute to turn around and go home, nobody would suspect anything was amiss.
Had this guy driven 500 miles to get to a trump rally your contention would hold more water.
IMO it was dumb luck he happened to live where he did, trump happened to pick a nearby town for a rally, and trump happened to pick a day close to the convention.
Now if there were / are hundreds of similar ready-to-shoot nutbags nationwide, we might expect to see more such events aimed at both Biden and trump. Based simply on the opportunity presented when the traveling rally show happens to come to a town near that particular nutbag.
How many assassin wannabe nutbags are actually out there? Damned good question.
Yes, had trump been killed the RNC would have been an amazing spectacle for the history books. You’re surely right about that. The knife fight / race to be crowned the new head MAGAt would be appalling to watch.
That was my thought, too. He seems more like a “this will show them” shooter than a political assassin. Anything that would have made a big splash would do the trick—a Biden rally would have been just as good. As it happened, a Trump rally was less than an hour’s drive away.
I recall a book which claimed that one of the first things a Secret Service director does when welcoming a president-elect is to sit him down and tell him something to the effect of, “Half of this nation didn’t vote for you, a portion of that wishes you no good, a minority outright hates your guts, and a tiny fraction would kill you if they had the chance and means.”
It does make one wonder, though, in a nation of 338 million why this sort of thing is still so statistically rare.
My WAG is that Haley would have been the heavy favorite by the rulebook, since she was the only other (R) candidate who had any delegates to her name. But I may be getting off-topic.
What confuses me is that most school shooters are alienated losers. This guy was a quiet loner (check), but also an academically accomplished nerd. I haven’t seen reports of the sort of narcissism that Oswald had. No reports of animal torture or anything like that. OTOH, we know very little about his home situation. We have reports from acquaintances, but none from the few friends that he allegedly had, AFAICT.
Was coercion involved? There’s no evidence of that. The accused allegedly scoped the crime scene out with a drone, which suggest to me he was self-motivated.