 "Donald Trump assassination bid: Did Secret Service ignore warnings of a gunman?")
How does a gunman, armed with an AR-style rifle manage to open fire on a former president at a campaign rally protected by federal and local law enforcement?
That’s the question everyone seems to be asking after Donald Trump suffered a graze wound to his right ear while speaking at a field in Butler Pennsylvania, and left the stage with a bloodied ear. While the former US president narrowly escaped the assassination bid, the gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed along with one bystander. Two others have been critically injured.
The shooting , the biggest since President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded outside a Washington hotel in 1981, has put the spotlight on the Secret Service and the possible lapses at the event.
How did the shooter get so close?
The shooter , armed with an AR-style rifle, fired multiple shots — some reports say five — from an “elevated position outside of the rally venue”, according to security officials. An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter, was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking.
AP reports that the roof from where the gunman fired shots was less 150 metres from where Trump was speaking — a distance from which a decent sniper can hit a target. Incidentally, 150 metres is the distance at which US Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.
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Steve Nottingham, a former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, told NBC News that Saturday’s shooting was “a fundamental security failure.”
Jim Cavanaugh, a retired special agent in charge with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who has been on Secret Service details, said he was surprised that the shooter was able to occupy an elevated position within rifle range of the rally site.
“Whenever I’ve been with them, every single high ground is taken by them or the local SWAT police,” Cavanaugh told NBC News. “There’s nobody allowed walking on rooftops. They command the high ground.”
Did security ignore warnings?
An eyewitness at the Trump rally has claimed that he had warned Trump’s security about a gunman on a roof “three or four minutes” before shots were fired, but that the claims were ignored.
A Telegraph report quoting the man says that he was outside the grounds when he and his friends drew the attention of the police when they noticed a person crawling onto a rooftop with a rifle while Trump was onstage in Pennsylvania. He claimed that minutes later, the gunman was still in position and managed to fire five times before the Secret Service “blew his head off”.
“We noticed the guy crawling, bear-crawling, up the roof of the building beside us, 50 feet away from us,” the eyewitness, wearing a “Trump 2020” hat, told BBC News.
“So we’re standing there you know, we’re pointing, we’re pointing at the guy crawling up the roof… he had a rifle. You can clearly see him with a rifle. Absolutely.”
He said he and his friends were “pointing” at the man for “two or three minutes” but police did not respond. “The police are down there running around on the ground,” the witness said. “We’re like, ‘Hey, man, there’s a guy on the roof for the rifle. And the police were like, ‘huh, what’ – they didn’t know what was going on.
“We’re like ‘hey right here on the roof, we can see him from right here.’
“And next thing you know, I’m like, I’m thinking to myself, I’m like, ‘Why is Trump still speaking? Why have they not pulled him off the stage?
“I’m standing there pointing at him for, you know, two or three minutes. Secret Service is looking at us… I’m pointing at that roof, just standing there… And next thing you know, five shots rang out.”
Is the Secret Service to blame?
Richard Goldinger, the Butler County district attorney, said that the security services had “maybe got a little lackadaisical” and thought that “this wouldn’t happen to a president or a former president”.
“He [the shooter] was outside of the ground, so to speak,” Goldinger told CNN. “So quite frankly, I don’t know how he would have gotten to the location where he was but he was outside the grounds and I think that’s something that we’re gonna have to figure out how he got there.”
Shortly after the shooting, Elon Musk said on social media: “The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign.”
Other US leaders have also called for an investigation into the “security failures” at the rally. Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said on social media that the House will have “Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other appropriate officials from DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the FBI appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP.”
Other Trump supporters also blasted the Secret Service. “How was a sniper with a full rifle kit allowed to bear crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee,” asked conservative activist Jack Posobiec on social media site X.
However, Pennsylvania State Police Lt Col George Bivens defended the Secret Service at a news conference after the shooting.
“It is incredibly difficult to have a venue open to the public and to secure that against any possible threat against a very determined attacker,” Bivens said. “That’s a huge lift.”
“The investigation will really give us an opportunity to take a look at where any failures occurred and what can be done better in the future,” he added.
What happens next?
The attack is certain to lead to a review of Trump’s security, and going forward he will likely be provided with a level of protection more akin to a sitting president, Joseph LaSorsa, a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential detail, told Reuters.
“There will be an intensive review” of the incident and “there’s going to be a massive realignment,” LaSorsa said. “This cannot happen.”
Meanwhile, the FBI said it will lead the investigation into the shooting, working with the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department “will bring every available resource to bear to this investigation.”
“My heart is with the former President, those injured, and the family of the spectator killed in this horrific attack,” Garland said in a statement. “We will not tolerate violence of any kind, and violence like this is an attack on our democracy.”
With inputs from agencies
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