The Secret Service agent that engaged the would-be Trump golf course assassin missed six shots despite being five feet away.
How does that even happen? How can even you even miss from that close?
I’m an adequate shot (not a Secret Service agent who presumably visits a shooting range every month), but I don’t think I could miss a human target from that range. Even if they were prone, behind a bush, next to a chain link fence.
I doubt any of my armed friends would miss either
That’s like the scene from Pulp Fiction:
Karl Rehn occasionally does some A/B testing for shooters at his range based on site picture, type of sights/red dot/etc. I would like to see him do some testing to see just how much you would need to distract even a semi-competent shooter to start missing a human target from 6 feet away. Mild electric shocks? A tuba solo directly behind them? A bright strobe light? 10 cans of Red Bull?
I wonder just how much distraction it would take for them to turn into as poor a shooter as this highly trained Secret Service agent.
I just hope they’re tasking the agent with gobs of range time before they work their next Trump detail…
(Note: No LinkSwarm today, as I’ve been too busy finishing up my latest book catalog. Maybe Monday…)
Tags: Crime, Guns, Karl Rehn, Secret Service, Trump Assassination Attempt, video
Law Enforcement are generally poor shots. A couple of decades ago, I had a friend who got invited to shoot at all the police competitions in the area. They were mostly shooting Glocks with 15 round magazine. He was shooting somewhat-customized 38 special. (It was a nice gun… he let me borrow it once.)
They would be struggling to hit the target. He would be making patterns on the paper.
Maybe the agent is a former cop with the NYPD? Just sayin’. Everybody remember that shootout in a crowded sidewalk in NY some years back where the cops shot seven innocent bystanders? Like Officer Fearless Fosdick straight out of the old comic strip!
“How does that even happen? How can even you even miss from that close?”
1.) Target is prone
2.) Shooter is flustered
3.) Technique is bad
So yeah, it’s possible. Go to any indoor range and you will see the ceiling peppered with random shots caused by heeling the gun in anticipation of recoil.
Malthus, I am going to have to go with Person’s Pulp Fiction thesis. More emotionally satisfying. If a person is assigned a task and so manifestly not qualified, it raises too many disturbing questions.
There’s an old saying that “You’re never too close to miss.” And for a lot that’s true, but for someone on the USSS Protection detail? And that distance? That’s not excusable.
I’d have to go with insufficient/bad training and WAY too jumpy.
Without fail, every single Federal agency I ever observed doing firearms training at a military installation where I was assigned…? It was usually a f*cking clownshow cluster-f*ck.
We had one agency show up at Fort Lewis, wanted to use the range they’d scheduled. They hadn’t bothered to either check on the rules, or get their people the range control training required to get the ability to actually, y’know… Open the range. They also didn’t show up with any communications systems, like the radios or field telephones required, which were all laid out clearly in the SOP handbooks for those ranges, which they were required to read and sign paperwork saying they understood them.
Morning of, they show up. Outraged to discover that without being able to talk to range control or have qualified personnel there to run the range, they weren’t going to get the range. Range Control guy is an old boss of mine, so he calls in a favor: We’re running an adjacent range, would I be able to do the necessities for the nice Federal agency? I agree; one of my larger errors in judgment. During the course of the time I let them run the range on their own, with just one of my safety guys down there to oversee and talk to me on the handheld radios we had, the knuckleheads managed to somehow spray 9mm all over Hell’s creation with an ungodly combination of a diminutive female agent and an Uzi she lost control of when the stock collapsed on her during full-auto fire.
I should mention that a heavily trafficked civilian road was about 20-30 yards behind the ranges we were using, and that at least some of the rounds went across that road. The berm in between the range they were using and the range we were using was high enough that none of my guys were hit, but there were rounds that apparently went that direction. I asked them to leave the range, reported it to the nice Range Control people, and called it a day.
Some Feds are firearms proficient. I think. The guys who do DOE nuclear security and the Bureau of Reclamation security dudes who do the dams are apparently quite good–They regularly compete on equal terms with some of the local civilians who like playing sniper. They don’t win all that often, but they are competitive. The rest of the agencies I’ve seen are abysmal when it comes to skill-at-arms; the hiring criteria don’t emphasize that, at all.
Isn’t that the longest piece of dialog that Samuel L. Jackson ever spoke without saying “motherf****r?”
In Pulp Fiction? Possibly. He evidently doesn’t say the M word once in Kill Bill Part 2, and of course not at all in either Incredibles film.
They want shooters to have a fair shot at Trump. Twice.
[…] OF TRAINING” COMES TO MIND: How Do You Miss Six Shots From Five Feet Away? “The Secret Service agent that engaged the would-be Trump golf course assassin missed six […]
When you’re in on the plot, you need to miss. Duh.
We had a female Illinois State Police officer in a class I was required to take with my 10 yo son to join a private range. I give her credit for taking the class on her own time to become proficient but the instructor had to move the silhouette target to less than 10 feet for her to hit it. I think part of the problem was that she was shooting her duty Glock with a 12lb trigger for “safety” and she didn’t have the grip strength.
I read somewhere recently that a lot of people who are very accurate when shooting at paper targets are unable to shoot at an actual human being. Apparently, such people may not even know this about themselves until it happens in real life. IIRC, the takeaway was, don’t get anything for self-defense unless you are certain you’re capable of using it.
I think most people vastly overestimates the amount of time secret service agents spend training, vs. standing posts making sure a door that should not open does not open or that no one comes along and unwelds a manhole cover. Several years back a congressional committee found that to maintain the desired level of proficiency in defensive tactics, firearms, and driving agents should spend 20% of their duty hours in training. In reality, it’s well under 1% and they still work ungodly amounts of overtime and pull in substantial numbers of HSI agents to assist.
“Flustered” sounds right, which is a training issue.
If you are flustered, and the first one misses, the gun is now not in a controlled state and I can see how one might miss half a dozen.
We are living in a Monty Python sketch.
The real question should be if they are current on their pronoun usage training. Priorities!
Occam’s Razor offers another explanation. He was holding off-target so that the perp could get off a money shot at Trump and was chortling in glee each time he pulled the trigger.
Well- WW1 would have never happened if that Serbian shot as bad as the Secret Service Agent.
I find this quite believable. During the first Attempted Trump Assassination, I saw a lot of incompetence. The laugher of the bunch was Overweight Pat, the short, fat agent that was so flustered she couldn’t holster her piece.
I a retired cop. Two friends/coworkers of mine were in a shooting with two robbery suspects behind a bar. Their patrol car was parked in an alley next to a chain link fence. The suspects opened fire and my friends returned it. No one hit anything because every round was deflected by the fence.
The Secret Service agent was shooting through a chain link fence towards an unseen suspect (the agent could only see the barrel of the rifle). This is likely not bad shooting, but a bad set of circumstances.
I once had a friend bring me in as a “ringer” (along with another) in his shooting class, being run for a group of Local big city Metro Swat hopefuls. Long story short. Of 10 qualifying test taken, the other ringer and I were first and second in 8 of them. On the draw, point and shoot (2 yard distance 3/4 silhoutte) one hopeful discharged ZERO shots before the 2 second buzzer sounded. Another shot 3 shots and MISSED with all 3. Only us two ringers and two others got the regulated two shots into the target on the SECOND attempt of the day. (6th time for each of them running the drill with that instructor.) and for the record, I am decent shot, but routinely finish in the middle 1/3 (sometimes lower) at our local 3 gun shoots.
Maybe he was supposed to let him get away and not be interrogated as to who gave him the right location.
Maybeso he meant to miss?
[…] Lawrence Person asks the important question: […]