Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspectin Saturday’s shooting, was registered as a Republican voter, according to Pennsylvania records.
Already the republicans are dismissing his voter registration as meaningless. Here comes the “mental illness” angle.
Edit: apparently it’s not uncommon to register with the party you oppose in PA. This is going to be a fun ride.
If it was a leg shot or a deliberate miss I could go for the conspiracy angle. But as it stands he was inches away from taking trumps life, which does not scream trump supporter to me.
Apparently he was hit by shattered glass from the teleprompter being shot, not grazed by a bullet.
(Not that I buy the conspiracy angle. I think it makes far more sense that we have a dangerously polarized society and a lot of seriously unhappy young men who don’t know what to do with their anger. That leads to violence.)
The glass thing was to my knowledge reported by TMZ though more recent reporting does say the bullet grazed his ear.
A shot to the leg can cause significant bleeding and is often more deadly than say… headshots (see Gabbie Giffords).
Trained gunmen / soldiers shoot for the center-of-mass. In fact, its clear that Trump wasn’t struck by a bullet now but instead by glass shards. So some glass deflected the bullet out of the way.
I know a guy who survived being shot in the head, he says doctors told him only 5% of people shot in the head survive and less recover as well as he has (he has minor issues, you’d never know if he didn’t have a dent and some metal in his skull.) Sure you can easily hit an artery in the leg and leg shots are for sure deadly too, but I wouldn’t say head shots are less deadly lol.
The training to aim center of mass is mainly because it is larger, if you’re familiar with The Patriot you may remember the scene where Mel and his small kids shoot at the British, he illustrates this point by saying “Remember, aim small miss small.”
Aiming for a larger target means you’re more likely to hit the target, and yes in modern times it means you’re more likely to get proper expansion of a hollow point, which means you’re less likely to shoot through him into a bystander. It also does just so happen that the A zone contains the heart and lungs, which are vital organs much like the brain. Head shots are “more deadly” if you hit, center of mass is more likely to hit a vital area rather than miss simply by virtue of being larger.
Or the kid was just shooting at the teleprompter. Maybe he didn’t intend to shoot Trump. We’ll never know.
He was secretly trying to save trump from the sentient teleprompter
I would imagine that the secret service men would have tourniquets and similar on hand to stop the bleeding.
That’s a lot of Hollywood bullshit about guns in your understanding of the world. I’d recommend that you stop watching movies (maybe even cartoons?) and instead read up on actual tactics and some physiology.
A fat, elderly, unhealthy 78-year-old-man could die from a heart attack from the tourniquet alone. Anyone taking shots at Trump at this age is going for the kill. There’s very, very few areas that are non-lethal, and those few areas are exceptionally difficult to hit 300meters away.
EDIT: A skilled marksman should be able to reliably hit someone at those ranges with an AR15. The kid fortunately wasn’t a skilled marksman. But even a skilled marksman won’t be aiming to do a Comic-book level or Hollywood level called shot to a non-lethal area at these ranges.