Three Strikes

Coffee and Covid notes a disturbing pattern in these assassination attempts. (H/t D29).

Taken together, the three attempts highlight a paradox: the protective apparatus keeps evolving— and so do the shooters’ tactics. It’s almost like each successive shooter knows how the Secret Service’s protocols have changed.

In the most recent two, the attacker was successfully neutralized before Trump was physically harmed, and in the latest, the suspect never made it to the final stairway. Yet, in spite of increasingly paranoid and enhanced security, each incident exposed a brand‑new seam — an unguarded rooftop, a gap in a golf‑course fence, a “layered security” perimeter that still allowed an armed man to sprint the last 50 yards....

If this were just three different shooters exploiting three different weak spots, that would be bad enough. But when you look more closely at the details, the pattern gets even harder to wave away as “bad luck.”...

Combine those three stories, and our N=3 dataset starts to look a lot less like three independent miracles of bad fortune and a lot more like a system that keeps failing in eerily specific ways.

One rooftop that was covered and then mysteriously uncovered. One would‑be sniper who spends hours inside the outer perimeter without any sweep pushing him out. One gunman who manages to pick the exact right moment when a half‑dozen security professionals aren’t physically in his way at a choke point designed precisely so that someone should always be in the way.

We can dismiss those questions as coincidence —as lottery-level luck— for three separate, consecutive “lone wolves.” If so, well, the crack where “incredible luck” lives is getting microscopically skinny. 

By coincidence, this points to an unrelated sports article that AVI just posted with his own commentary about how people are bad at estimating the odds of three or more successive events.  

This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable.  A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343) 

That's true: even with good odds, getting three in a row is hard. How about with allegedly terrible odds? 

Inside help looks like the most probable theory. That's not an accusation, just an observation about the math.