Yep. It’s not like he Just walked in and sat down on the edge of the bed next to the
That was a shoe. 
Point taken, though.
the point is not taken. It was a shoe. When someone gets in an elevator wearing a shoe it’s OK because it’s not a weapon. It’s clothing. when someone gets in an elevator with a gun then it’s a serious breach of security.
The reason this person got so far into the inner sanctuary of the White House is because they shut the security alarm off because someone complained about it. That could only be the President.
To be fair he could have planted a bomb or walked outside to Marine One and shot the President and his family dead.
There is no “first string”. There is only competent people operating under competent procedures.
I know you mean well, but shooting someone without killing them is pure Hollywood bullshit. In the real world, it’s not a viable option.
Regarding the dogs - according to one of the DC TV news reports, the dogs weren’t released because there was concern about them attacking SS agents. :eek: Sooooo, why have dogs in the first place?
Surely someone can come up with a fence design that is extremely difficult to get over without topping it with concertina wire - or maybe just electrify the top few feet?
My gut thought, based on nothing I’ve ever heard or read, is that complacency in training has set in. I spent 37 years in federal service, both active duty and as a civilian employee. I found that the more times certain training courses were conducted, the less effort went into them, as if the instructors figured we all knew the material as well as they did. Now, when you’ve had Prevention of Sexual Harassment training annually for 20 years, you do pretty much know it all, but that’s a bit different from protecting the President and his family as well as other leaders. Like I said, this notion isn’t based on anything but much lower-level stuff I experienced over the years.
I think it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the shoe containing a decent sized explosive charge and a radio activated detonator in the sole. The shoe tosser could have set the charge off as it passed by Bush’s head. Sure, it wasn’t a bomb - but it could easily have been.
Just have the top two feet lean outward slightly. It isn’t an ugly aesthetic effect, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder to climb over. (Except for sailors who are used to clambering up futtock shrouds.)
No it wasn’t. It was an actual, honest-to-goodness grenade, and it’s only an unlikely stroke of luck that it didn’t go off.
Different incident. In this case, the grenade was barely on the extreme edge of the theoretical kill radius. More like than not, former president Bush would not have been seriously injured.
No it’s wasn’t. Shagnasty said that a grenade was thrown at President Bush. running coach said that a grenade was not thrown, but rather a shoe. A shoe was thrown in a different incident, but a grenade was also thrown at Bush, and it seems likely that Shagnasty is referring to that, since there is no other hyperbole or sarcasm in the post. As for being outside the the kill radius, wikipedia says the grenade had a an effective radius of 15-20 meters and a maximum radius of 30 meters. It landed 18.6 meters away, so there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t have done harm. This is probably the closest a president has come to being injured or killed since Reagan; Bush got extremely lucky that day.
It was certainly a security failure, as a better throw and a working grenade could have done real harm. However, 18m is well outside of the danger zone for an RGD-5. 18m is pushing the maximum effective fragmentation radius of 20m. The only real danger at that distance is a fluke eye impact. Except for a rare chance of getting hit in the eye, its only going to cause superficial cuts at that distance. The RGD-5 only has 3.9 ounzes of TNT. For comparison, an American M67 grenade has 6.5 ounces of Comp B; the equivalent of almost 8 ounces of TNT. The M67 also has about a quarter pound of more fragmentation material. The killing radius of an M67 radius is only 5m. The potential injury distance tops out at 15m. Anything further than that is not likely to require anything more than first aid, if that. If a grenade with twice the explosives and 50% more fragmentation would not injure him at 18m, then that grenade would not either. I suspect the Russians were fudging their numbers a bit.
Source: US Army FM 3-23.30 Grenades and Pyrotechnic Signals.
First of all, the guy should have been spotted.
Then, the guy should have been stopped, one way or the other.
A hail of bullets is not out of order, in this situation.
I’m sure the pundits and Congress expected the Secret Service to have spotted, and then stopped, the intruder. A hail of bullets, at any point within the fence, is appropriate.
Well yes given the current state if affairs. We have a Secret Service agency that turned off the alarm system because it was an annoyance. Given that level of competency an unscreened person could have had a bomb. But the function of the Secret Service is to screen people expected to come in contact with the president. So in the other example a sneaker was just a sneaker.
This is completely beyond incompetence that a security system was turned off, dogs weren’t released, and agents couldn’t communicate the threat in time to stop the intruder and secure the building.
A theory I’ve heard is that Obama’s race has prompted a threat level on an unprecedented scale and the Secret Service, having grown complacent after decades of guarding white guys, just have not been prepared.
Nobody has taken a direct shot at him yet and we’ve had 2 Presidents shot at in my life time. We’re not talking about airplanes flying into the White House. We’re talking about one of many people hopping the fence. It happens on a regular basis.
When you weed out the crazies with no plan of attack what’s left?
Once on a Baseball Think Factory political thread, the subject of ‘How would you go about assassinating the President’* came up. The general consensus was that unless you have 100 well-armed friends, attacking the White House would be sheer lunacy because it’s supposed to be a fort…maybe not so much.
*Let’s NOT start that discussion here. The owner of BBTF shut us down in the aforementioned thread saying that a similar thread had once come up, and that soon after Federal Agents were in his office going over everything.
I dont want to hikack this thread at all but seems to have a similar theme to the suspect arrested today at the White House today. I’m grasping at threads to relate the two.
I have two separate ideas: it’s great the Secret Service stopped the guy before he jumped the fence. The thing I thought was bad: they published the guy’s photo on NBC. No one was looking for the guy and the guy doesn’t need to see his photo to hold up his ego. Why do you think someone would publish his photo like that?
I liked how the Iate Paul Harvey handled such stories on his radio show. He would give the story, saying something along the lines of “The man jumped over the fence at the White House. He would like us to mention his name. Page two.” That was his cue to go to a commercial break, never speaking his name.