Some Perspective on How a 20-Year-Old Could Shoot Trump and Almost Kill Him

The real question in the attempted assassination is not, could a 20-year-old shoot and nearly kill former President Trump, but how he was allowed to get in position to do so. The shot itself was not that hard. Here’s some perspective.

When I was 22, I volunteered for the U.S. Army and was shipped to beautiful, bucolic Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo. in late February 1978. Most of the recruits were younger than me, a couple as young as 17. By the end of eight weeks in boot camp, every one of us could shoot a rifle and hit a target. We used M-16s, an automatic weapon. That means, when you pull the trigger, it doesn’t stop shooting bullets until you release the trigger or the magazine runs out. By contrast, the similar AR-15 shooter Crooks used is semi-automatic, meaning you have to pull the trigger for each bullet.

I couldn’t remember the distance on which we had to qualify. But Military.com provides the answer today: “In order to qualify, you must hit at least 23 out of 40 pop-up targets at ranges varying from 5 meters to 300 meters (approximately 80 to 327 yards).”

Crooks fired from 148 yards out, less than half that distance.

Fuquay Gun & Gold owner Clay Ausley in North Carolina told WRAL News: “Your very experienced shooters can stretch on out with a 556 to several hundred yards so 150 yards really isnt that far.” The AR-15 uses a 5.56 mm round. “I’d say the average person within an hour – I could have you at 100 yards hitting a softball every shot…. You come down here to some of our more rural counties – Harnett County, Chatham County – 20-year-olds there? I'm gonna say a good portion of them could take that AR-15 and at 150 yards, easily hit a target with no problem.”

Biden often brags about passing the 1994-2004 federal Assault Weapons Ban when he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Now he shouts: “And we’ll do it again!” It’s another case of him living in the past.

The fact is, it didn’t ban bolt-action rifles. Like the mail-order Italian Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle Lee Harvey Oswald used, according to the Warren Commission, to kill JFK. So a total ban, assuming all the tens of thousands of “assault rifles” could be rounded up, still wouldn’t stop a potential assassination.

As to the 1994 ban itself, Wikipedia has a good summary:

In 2004, a research report commissioned by the National Institute of Justice found that if the ban was renewed, the effects on gun violence would likely be small and perhaps too small for reliable measurement, because rifles in general, including rifles referred to as “assault rifles” or “assault weapons,” are rarely used in gun crimes.

In 2005 a National Research Council study found:

A recent evaluation of the short-term effects of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence outcomes (Koper and Roth, 2001b). Using state-level Uniform Crime Reports data on gun homicides, the authors of this study suggest that the potential impact of the law on gun violence was limited by the continuing availability of assault weapons through the ban’s grandfathering provision and the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban. Indeed, as the authors concede and other critics suggest (e.g., Kleck, 2001), given the nature of the intervention, the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small and, if there were any observable effects, very difficult to disentangle from chance yearly variation and other state and local gun violence initiatives that took place simultaneously.

The fact is America is a gun country. There are, by some estimates, 450 million guns.

No one will ever take our guns away from a people who slap on their pickups bumper stickers reading:

The solution? We need to fix the Secret Service, just like we need to fix Boeing and so much else.

If American banned “assault rifles,” it wouldn’t be America any more. It would be Canada.