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[WSJ Editorial Board] The Shooting of Donald Trump

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Jul 14, 2024.

  1. Amiga

    Amiga Member

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    The shooter came from a family identified by Trump's 2016 team as strongly Republican. The shooter himself is a registered Republican.

    REVEALED: Trump campaign secret data on gunman’s family – Channel 4 News

    The owner of the rifle used to shoot at Donald Trump had been identified by the former president’s campaign as a strong republican, likely gun owner and “hunter”, as revealed today by Channel 4 News.

    In 2016 the Trump campaign built a database profiling millions of voters in key battleground states – including the family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks.

    It found that both the parents of Thomas Crooks were very likely to be gun owners and shared other gun-related lifestyle indicators.

    This database was first obtained and revealed by Channel 4 News in 2016.

    The programme can now reveal the information was compiled as part of a secretive project aiming to identify millions of gun owners in America who could be targeted with pro-gun rights messages in the lead-up to the 2016 election campaign.

    On Saturday Thomas Crooks, 20, attempted to murder former president Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

    It has emerged that the AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle he used was legally purchased months earlier by his father Matthew, 53. The family is cooperating with the investigating authorities.

    The FBI said it had also recovered explosive devices in the car used by Thomas Crooks which was parked near the scene and a second “suspicious device” in the family home.

    There is no suggestion that any member of the Crooks family had knowledge of the assassination attempt by recent high school graduate Thomas Crooks or that they permitted the illegal use of weapons by him.

    DATABASE

    Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign database, obtained by Channel 4 News in 2020, lists the assailant’s parents Matthew, and his wife Mary, 53, as living at a residence in the borough of Bethel Park, south of Pittsburgh.

    They were among 6.7 million people in the swing state of Pennsylvania profiled for their likely ownership of firearms. Both scored highly, with Crook’s father Matthew given particularly high scores.

    Data scientists can analyse relatively small original datasets to determine the characteristics that would make someone likely, for example, to be a gun owner. Using machine learning they can generate models that match those characteristics across the population, assigning individuals a likelihood score.

    The gun-related profiles which appear in the 2016 Trump campaign database range between 0 – meaning no likelihood – and 1 – a certainty.

    Matthew Crooks scored highly across a range of gun-related models including: 0.99 for the likelihood of returning a warranty card for a firearms purchase; 0.95 for the likelihood of pursuing hunting sports; and 0.94 for the likelihood of shopping at the hunting retailer

    Overall, averaged across all three of these measures, out of more than 19,000 people in Bethel Park, Matthew Crooks was among the top 20 highest scoring individuals.

    In total, the data technique was deployed in ten swing states – scoring a total of around 50 million individuals – to find voters who could be susceptible to political messages about gun-rights, a bedrock issue in all of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

    While the Crooks family were assigned scores derived from models, such models are not necessarily accurate and may not reflect the Crooks family’s actual views or gun ownership at that time.

    Channel 4 News has approached the Trump campaign for comment.
     
    FranchiseBlade likes this.
  2. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    can't speak to any of the other info in this piece, but the statement "It has emerged that the AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle he used was legally purchased months earlier by his father Matthew, 53" would appear to be false. It has been widely reported that the firearm had been purchased by the father 11 years earlier at a gun store that is no longer open.
     
  3. Amiga

    Amiga Member

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    MAGA World’s Reckless Point-Scoring
    Prominent Republicans turned up the temperature within minutes of Saturday’s shooting.

    By Tom Nichols

    https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/07/trump-shooting-republicans-criticism/679026/

    Some prominent Republicans tried immediately to blame Democrats for the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. Such charges are cynical attempts to immunize Trump from any further criticism.

    Irresponsible Speculation

    Within hours of the attempt on Trump’s life on Saturday, RealClearPolitics, a right-leaning news and commentary site, noted the name of the shooter and added that his “online profile suggests that [he] was a leftist radical.” It did not provide evidence to back up this claim. The website later removed that sentence without acknowledging the deletion, but not fast enough to stop that line from spreading over onto social media.

    So far, it seems that Trump’s would-be assassin had no significant online presence beyond a Discord account that had not been used in months, according to the platform. The FBI said that its agents have obtained the gunman’s phone, but so far they have not identified a motive for the shooting.

    I do not know why RCP leapt to its conclusion about the gunman’s ideology. (RealClearPolitics did not respond to a request for an explanation of the silent change.) Speculating at a time like this is a natural temptation—but it’s also wildly irresponsible to do so publicly. What we do know is that the attacker was male, young, and white and, according to reporters at several outlets who have interviewed his acquaintances, also apparently intelligent and reportedly something of a social outcast, a profile similar to some other mass shooters. He was a registered Republican, which might not mean anything.

    I don’t know what his politics were. Neither does anyone else in the general public. Newspapers and websites could have run headlines that said “Registered Republican Shoots Republican Candidate at Republican Rally in Heavily Republican Area” and it would have been accurate—in fact, it is completely true. Wisely, publications did not do that, because so far, none of this information, despite being factually correct, seems relevant to the attack.

    So much uncertainty, of course, did not stop people across the political spectrum from making wild accusations about the shooter, but some Republican leaders went the extra distance to try to gain an instant political advantage from the mayhem. Instead of heeding the calls of more responsible Americans to help turn down the national temperature at a horrifying moment, they dialed it up to thermonuclear.

    Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, for example, complained that “Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy.” (For the sake of accuracy, I should note that Democrats and others have said this because Trump and some of his conservative enablers are threats to democracy.) “Their inflammatory rhetoric,” Scott added, “puts lives at risk.”

    In fairness to Senator Scott, he’s right that political rhetoric can provoke violence. Cesar Sayoc, for example, is now in a federal prison for mailing bombs to prominent liberals; his defense attorneys claimed that Sayoc is an unstable person who was influenced by his “religious” viewing of Fox News programs such as Fox & Friends and Hannity, along with his immersion in Facebook groups and social media.

    Troubled people will do unhinged things, and that should not be an excuse for limiting the ability of American citizens to engage in full-throated criticism of public figures. But some prominent Republicans—people in elected office who have a responsibility as leaders to show at least some restraint—have tried to link a terrible moment of violence to the political views of their foes without any evidence or detailed information, all for the sake of lazy and irresponsible point-scoring.

    ...

    These GOP partisans know exactly what they’re doing. They have always known that Trump himself is the source of much of the most violent rhetoric in modern American life. The former president’s speeches are a mad swirl of paranoia and rage at everyone who isn’t in his camp, and a constant source of embarrassment for supporters, especially elected political leaders in the Republican establishment, who want to portray him as a statesman. For these Trump allies, the attempt on the former president’s life was an opportunity to put Trump critics (including some in the media) on the defensive and to immunize Trump from any further condemnations of his own ghastly statements.

    As Ed Luce of the Financial Times put it on social media yesterday, this behavior is nothing less than “an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop [Trump] from regaining power.”

    And it seems to be working. This morning, MSNBC canceled today’s edition of Morning Joe, a decision that one unnamed source explained to CNN was made “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” (As the NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen noted, MSNBC’s decision “brings further dimension to the trust-in-media problem: we don't trust ourselves.”)

    Today, The New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury sent a note to readers after outrage from Trump supporters about the Sunday insert in the print edition of the paper calling Trump unfit for office. “There is no connection between our prior decision to run this editorial package in print and Saturday’s incident,” Kingsbury explained, adding, “We would have changed our plans if we could have.” More to the point: The Trump editorial was already online two days before the shooting. The Times is now on its back foot about something it had already published.

    Fortunately, more reasonable people are making the utterly sensible point that you can accurately call Donald Trump a menace to democracy and affirm that he is a reprehensible person while also condemning any violence in politics. My colleague David Frum was among the most eloquent of these voices:

    Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

    Trump’s behavior in the public square continues to merit withering denunciation. Criticizing him in the starkest terms is not wishing him personal harm, and those who assert otherwise are engaging in a cheap attempt to silence the just accusations of Americans who are genuinely concerned about Trump’s dark vision for their country.
     
    #43 Amiga, Jul 16, 2024
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2024
  4. Amiga

    Amiga Member

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    I read conflicting reports. The Washington Post reported that it was purchased in 11 years ago (didn't indicate the source, except person familar). USA Today speculated a purchase in 2020 based on some hacked data. The AP said it was purchased at least 6 months ago, according to law enforcement. I haven't seen the FBI making a statement on when it was purchased. USA Today also reported Gmail records of reviews for licensed gun resellers by the father. All of this suggests guns are an important part of this family, and that's what the 2016 Trump campaign also captured through their own data mining. All suggestive.
     
    Os Trigonum likes this.
  5. Amiga

    Amiga Member

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    How it went down.

    They had their eye on him an hour, and again 20 minutes before the shooting, but lost him. A blind spot for a sniper to exploit, a decision not to cancel when he went missing — these will be scrutinized in the Secret Service investigations.

    It seems the boy intended to cause more harm, possibly with bombs, targeting high-level officials. Trump happened to be nearest to him. He might also have been severely depressed.


    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/secret-service-trump-shooting.html

    About an hour before a gunman let loose a volley of bullets that nearly assassinated a former president, the law enforcement contingent in Butler, Pa., was on the verge of a great policing success.

    Among the thousands of people streaming in to cheer former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, local officers spotted one skinny young man acting oddly and notified other law enforcement. The Secret Service, too, was informed, through radio communication. The suspicious man did not appear to have a weapon.

    Remarkably, law enforcement had found the right man — Thomas Matthew Crooks, a would-be assassin, though officers did not know that at the time. Then they lost track of him.

    Twenty minutes before violence erupted, a sniper, from a distance, spotted Mr. Crooks again and took his picture.

    As time slipped away, at least two local officers were pulled from traffic detail to help search for the man. But the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting Mr. Trump, did not stop him from taking the stage. Eight minutes after Mr. Trump started to speak, Mr. Crooks fired off bullets that left the Republican presidential nominee bloodied and a rally visitor dead.
    The call to let the rally go ahead while law enforcement looked for a potentially dangerous person is one of many Secret Service decisions now being called into question. The agency is also under scrutiny for allowing a building within a rifle’s range to be excluded from its secure perimeter, creating a blind spot close to the former president that the gunman exploited.

    ...

    Even as investigators continue to examine what happened, it is already clear that there were multiple missed opportunities to stop Mr. Crooks before the situation turned deadly.

    On July 8, an advance team walked the site, the Butler Farm Show grounds, to assess a security threat. Agents worked with local law enforcement and explained what the Secret Service would handle and what law enforcement would be expected to do. Crucially, the Secret Service decided that a group of warehouses to the north of the stage would be excluded from the security zone, despite being only about 450 feet from Mr. Trump’s podium. That was within a rifle’s range.

    But that created a blind spot, outside the security perimeter but well within rifle range of Mr. Trump. It was exploited by a gunman with no military training and little subtlety, who showed up early and acted oddly enough that police photographed him and distributed his picture, though with no weapon in view.

    ...

    But in the aftermath, when the F.B.I. was able to finally access Mr. Crooks’s cellphones and other electronic devices, agents could see that he had searched for images of Mr. Trump as well as President Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and even F.B.I. Director Christopher A. Wray.

    Mr. Crooks also had at typed in “major depressive disorder” and searched for dates and places for appearances for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

    One of Mr. Trump’s planned appearances happened to be about 50 miles from Mr. Crooks’s house in Bethel Park, Pa.

    ...

    In his car, a Hyundai Sonata, Mr. Crooks brought an AR-15 style rifle, bought by his father more than a decade earlier. And he brought two homemade bombs, in which a potentially explosive mixture of fertilizer and fuel was packed inside empty ammunition cans that were roughly the size of a toolbox.

    The bombs were fitted with a remote-control receiver — the type typically used to set off fireworks displays remotely — according to another federal government report seen by The Times. The report said the bombs appeared designed to be set off by a remote control. He brought that, too.

    ...

    In his pocket, he carried a remote control to the bombs in his car.

    It was not clear if he had tried to use it, or if the bombs were made well enough to explode.
     
    #45 Amiga, Jul 17, 2024
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2024

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