Now, Just a Doggone Minute!

Tiny, almost imperceptible, Donnie Trump was shot yesterday, and whoever shot him (how they could even see him without a microscope is a mystery) grazed his ear.  Donnie was fine, except he will probably need to wear a Band-Aid for a little while.  Boy, does this raise questions.

First of all, this occurred at one of Donnie's rallies?  Frankly, I'm not impressed with the level of security.

Second, Donnie was shot with a gun.  I thought we all loved guns, and thought that as many people as possible should carry them, for...security.  Maybe the person who shot Donnie thought Donnie was a threat.  Isn't this what we're always told to react against?  Threats?  In Florida, we're told to "Stand [Our] Ground."  If we feel threatened, we should shoot first, and ask questions later.  In the case of Donnie and his rally, the shooter, who walked into a rally carrying a gun, and was able to do this because there was no security, was then shot dead by Secret Service.  How...um...convenient.

Third, someone else at Donnie's rally, besides the shooter, was killed.  So the shooter was capable of shooting and killing someone.  And all he did was graze Donnie's ear?  What I know about anatomy includes that the ear is attached to the head.  The shooter could have done a lot more damage to Donnie than grazing his ear.

This puts me in mind of five Sherlock Holmes movie episodes.  One was from the 1940s, when Holmes (Basil Rathbone) notes that one member of the Security Council reported having suffered a gunshot injury to the back of the hand (it's minor; oh, that?; never mind, I'm fine), and Holmes later revealed that this injury was one of the early indicators that made him suspicious of this member of the Council (who was in fact guilty, and inflicted the injury on himself).  The second was also from the Rathbone movies, when Holmes is investigating the alleged deaths of a group of people -- the "Good Comrades" -- and he notes that one of the "Good Comrades" notices an impossible-to-see needle sticking up in the chair in which he was about to sit, and says, with noteworthy composure, that he thinks someone was trying to poison him.  (It turned out the "Good Comrades" were simulating their own deaths to get the life insurance money.)  In the third, from the 2000s, Watson (Martin Freeman) is thought by Col Shan, a Chinese crime syndicate leader looking for a valuable item that was stolen from Shan's criminal network, to be Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Watson and his new girlfriend are kidnapped and threatened with death.  Shan points out to Watson that if the criminal network had wanted to kill him, they would already have done it.  "If an assassin can't kill you in three tries, what does that tell you?  That they're not really trying."  In a later episode, Watson is again assaulted and kidnapped, and put into a large collection of sticks to be burned.  Holmes rescues him, and in a still later episode, the person whose organization threatened Watson reassured that "I had people standing by, Dr Watson.  We would never have let you burn."  In that same episode, Holmes walks in on Watson's new wife while she was threatening to kill the ringleader who later reassured Watson.  She told Holmes that if he came a step further, she would shoot him.  He walked toward her, and she shot him in the lower chest.  Holmes later referred to Mrs Watson's shot not as an attempt to kill him, but as "surgery."  It was enough to get him hospitalized and out of her way (she called 911), but not enough to kill him.

So, we're left with the seemingly impossible curiosity about someone who brings a gun to a political rally, isn't detected, kills one person (but not the large person standing at a height at center stage), but grazes Trump's ear.  Something is wrong with this story.  My homepage adds that the shooter had explosives in his car.  It's further unclear what he expected to do with them.

If this story could be harder to understand, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News complicates it further.  The assailant, conveniently killed by Secret Service, was 20 year old Thomas Crooks of Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania is where the rally was.  Crooks was a registered Republican, and on 1/20/21, he donated $15 to the "Progressive Turnout Project PAC."  It turns out the "Progressive Turnout Project PAC" has nothing to do with Progressives or Democrats, or much to do with Republicans, and is what is now commonly referred to as "clickbait," the aim of which is to confuse people into donating.  Young Crooks was 17 (a minor) when he made the donation, so the donation was illegal, and Crooks either didn't read the requirements to donate, didn't understand them, or lied.  And the e-mail was to encourage people to tune in to the inauguration on 1/20/21.  Why anyone would pay $15 to watch something that's free on TV is...well...  It's unclear why Crooks donated ($15 once isn't much to many people, but maybe it is to a 17 year old), and he never donated again.

So, why did Crooks bring a gun to the rally?  People reported hearing shots before they saw anything.  Why did no one see this kid with an openly carried gun?  If the kid wanted to kill Donnie, who, under the circumstances, would have been easy to kill, why didn't he kill him?

Clearly, there are unanswered questions which the Secret Service has made it harder to answer.  But it is noteworthy that there's a contingent who say that Donnie's injury will benefit him.  Ronnie Reagan would pat him on the back, and encourage him to milk this thing.  Of course, Ronnie was more seriously injured, and Donnie got something a little worse than a shaving cut.  He'll get an extra sympathy vote.  It would be fair to wonder if this was what this shooting was all about.  Did Crooks sacrifice himself to help get Donnie elected?  He had to have known he wasn't going to walk out of there.  Although +/-20 is the common age for the onset of schizophrenia, but we don't know more about Crooks, I never evaluated him, and I never will.