• Cort@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Iirc, back when it happened, there were people from his highschool target shooting team that said he didn’t make the team because he wasn’t a good shot.

    • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      I rewatched the broadcast to confirm, Trump absolutely inadvertently stepped out of the shot right as the shooter pulled the trigger. Trump went from standing with a hand on the podium, to leaning forward on it as he turned his head to his right.

      The shooter brought a laser rangefinder which suggests he was aware of at least basic marksmanship fundamentals like bullet drop from gravity. He also had an AR-15, with a red dot and was laying prone with no visual barriers between him and the dais where Trump was about 130 yards away. Even a budget AR shooting basic af ammo can expect to shoot a 4 inch circle at that distance- plenty enough for a headshot.

      Trump survived through dumb luck.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Just did some quick napkin math. At the low end, the .223 has a muzzle velocity of about 900 yards per second, which, at that distance, means that the bullet made it to Donald in roughly 0.14s. at the high end, muzzle velocity is about 1233 yards per second, meaning it cleared the gap in very nearly .1s even. I did a bit of googling, and it looks like human reaction time at the low end is about 200 ms, BUT can be much lower or even a hair premature if the reaction is the result of a trained, anticipatory response. As such, it seems likely that Crooks’ reaction time, rather than 0.2s, was much closer to some negligible value, even when considered from the frame of a bullet’s travel.

        That means that wherever Donald’s head was 0.1-0.15s before the infamous bullet photo was taken is probably very close to what Crooks saw when he pulled the trigger.

          • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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            2 days ago

            No, I meant yards. I converted f/s to y/s by dividing the muzzle velocity in f/s by three so that I could work in the same units the guy above me used to measured Trump’s distance from crooks.

      • edgemaster72@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Moral of the story: wait for him to do some stupid pose so you know he’ll stand still instead of fidgeting while he talks

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      I used to participate in International Defensive Pistol Association competitions. I was, honestly, terrible. I’d routinely mangle or just do an overall uninspiring job of the up close shots, and I was hardly as smooth and quick as anyone else there. I just didn’t have the money to burn through ammo and time at the range like other folks did. One time, we were doing a series of targets at thirty feet and the spirit came over me and I double tapped two of them right in the jugular notch as smooth as you like. Won’t claim it as an achievement because I can’t even remotely come close to reproducing it, I’m still not that good of a shot, and I wouldn’t have believed I was going to do it if you’d told me ahead of time. I can’t explain why or how I did it, just, idk, rolled a twenty that time I guess.

      • julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        I once fired a 22 round through the middle of a polo mint without breaking it from 25m away. I framed that shit because likewise, knew that wasn’t happening again. That’s part of the fun of the sport as a an amateur, occasionally chance does funny things.