OSD 282: Takeaways from the assassination attempt
When things are moving fast, it’s best to (a) not jump to conclusions and (b) maintain a crisp catalog of what you do know. It’s hard to do both at the same time, but let’s do it. Our takeaways in no particular order. (Don’t worry, it’ll be gun-related by the end.)
X as the source of truth
As the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was unfolding, you had two ways to get news about it. You could go to a mainstream news site and get wildly circumspect reporting like “Trump rushed off stage after loud noises at rally” (an actual CNN headline), and then wait a couple hours for details to emerge. Or you could go to X and get 4K video from multiple angles of exactly what happened, and a live feed of incoming details.
The signal on X is of course buried in a lot of noise, but there’s a version of “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” that applies here. Given enough tweets coming in fast enough, all incorrect information is shallow. Mistakes don’t matter if the hivemind corrects them quickly. Speed beats everything.
Internet as sentient ooze
It’s fascinating to watch the internet when something wild is happening. It’s like an ooze that comes to life, morphing in real time into all kinds of shapes. For a while you stare at the ooze, dazzled by the iridescent patterns it’s making. Then you notice that the ooze is staring back.
Internet as mild omniscience
With the device you’re using right now, noteworthy events become visible to you in near-real-time, from multiple angles. For more context, you also get text, video, and audio piped in to you from other minor wizards. We haven’t even seen all the video come out yet. There’s new angles we haven’t seen, body cams, people discovering things in the background of videos they took on their phone, etc. This isn’t full omniscience, but in the limit, it will be. If this assassination attempt happened 100 years from now, you’d be able to fly around a 3D video of the whole event at 120,000 fps.
A mild version of that already exists today:
Secret Service needs to retro on this
Skills that can't be practiced for real tend to atrophy, and it has been 43 years since the Secret Service was tested live like this. (See “OSD 184: It works in practice but does it work in theory?”) So there's a lot to learn.
There’s the obvious question of how the shooter got onto a nearby roof without being stopped. The kneejerk solution to that would be a policy that says, “All roofs with a line of sight to the protectee need to have a team of agents on them, effective immediately.” That may be a fine policy, but there are more system-level questions to address. Like how do they decide where to post agents? How should comms between the overall team (which includes different agencies from local to federal) work? How can the system empower a local LEO who spots a problem to safely and effectively call an audible? And so on. The ideal is that you build a good system and then the right behaviors fall out of it. Not that you build a system which tries top-down to predict every eventuality.
But it’s very hard to retro properly in these circumstances
When a system fails, there’s an impulse to say that heads need to roll. And with large failures, that is usually appropriate. But the right way to do this is to understand what happened in extreme detail, and then decide what changes — personnel-wise and otherwise — to make. If you start out looking for people to blame, then everyone’s going to put their guard up and it’s going to be impossible to discover, let alone discuss, the details of what happened. So sure you can (and should) fire the leadership, but you need to build a culture among the rank-and-file of being able to speak openly and blamelessly about how to improve everybody’s performance.
It might be impossible for federal agencies to retro well in situations like this, given the inevitable politics. But as close as they can, they should get every agent who worked the event into a room and break down the whole thing second by second. Then decide what actions to take. Not the other way around.
It’s perplexing to suddenly need to shoot someone
You’re a Secret Service counter sniper. You’ve spent thousands of hours looking through your scope, and nothing ever happens. Your protectee is in the middle of a speech, just like all the other speeches. Today you’ll add 60 minutes to that tally of thousands of hours.
Suddenly somebody’s head crests a roof 150 yards away.
How many seconds do you wait before shooting them?
Well, do they have a gun? Maybe, but maybe it’s a local trying to get a good photo. “Secret Service kills beloved local photography student from 150 yards away”, that’ll be a good headline. Maybe it’s one of the local cops covering that area. You don’t have direct comms with them. This former cop says that Secret Service was a few seconds away from shooting a friendly SWAT unit at the G8 summit back in 2004.
The optimal answer is definitely not “wait for them to fire first, that way you know their intent”, but anyone who tells you the optimal answer is easy just hasn’t thought about it very hard.
Disclaimer: we have no idea yet what actually happened. Maybe the countersnipers were staring at the would-be assassin for minutes and didn’t take a shot because of silly bureaucracy. It seems increasingly likely there was severe institutional incompetence here. The point is just that even if you could assume that the institution is perfectly competent, this stuff would still be hard.
There’s a lesson here for gun owners and self-defenders. Training, drills, and research are critical, but real life is always going to be messy. Find training that forces you to think quickly in real time, but build situational awareness so that you can avoid the real-life situations that put you in that position.
Downgrade your estimate of how safe Secret Service protectees really are. An untrained 20-year-old yoloed his way to within 0.5 MOA of an assassination.
There are two explanations for how the would-be assassin came so close to succeeding.
The first is that the one event where someone thought, “Let me just waltz onto the roof with a rifle” happened to also be the one event with lax enough security for that plan to work.
The second is that this is the typical security level, and this is the one time it really got vibe checked.
The second explanation is more likely, since if the first were true, “Young man with rifle and ladder apprehended near campaign rally” would be a more common headline.
Mass shooters and would-be assassins: somehow both very obsessed and very inept
It’s continually surprising how impulsively these loners throw their life away. Nominally, they are obsessed with their goal, and from a rational person’s state of mind, you’d think it would follow from that that they’d do a ton of planning. They write whole manifestos and so on. But that obsession is combined with bumbling, reckless action.
Trump’s would-be assassin was on the roof in plain view of the public for minutes, acted weird outside the rally beforehand while armed with a rifle, and didn’t bother to buy a magnified scope (unclear from pictures so far if he had a red dot or just iron sights). Or consider the Orlando nightclub shooter, who picked a target location more or less at random on the day of the shooting.
A friend put it well: “I think it’s obsessive focus that finally erupts. So it’s sort of looping manic thinking rather than cold calculation.“
The limiting factor on these acts of violence is just social contagion
Put all this together and you get the conclusion that, like mass shootings, this sort of thing just isn’t hard for a motivated loner to do. And crucially, while it can be made harder, it can’t be made impossible. There will always be soft targets available. So the thing that determines how often this happens isn’t the feasibility. The feasibility is already high today. If that was the only brake on this, there’s be mass shootings and assassination attempts daily.
Yesterday Richard Hanania elaborated on that point:
This event is going to teach us a lot about counter sniper tactics and event security, and that’s good for a peaceably armed citizenry. But it would be bad if that discussion makes assassinations a salient topic. There hasn’t been a social contagion on that in the US in over 100 years, and we’d do well to keep it that way.
This week’s links
Other interesting links related to the assassination attempt
Thoughts from a cop who has worked presidential security details
Aerial video that gives a good sense of everyone’s relative location
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