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?”