A lot of people have been making statements along the lines of “the shooter was a terrible shot. Anybody could have made that shot.”

I am not going to mention the name of the shooter. He’s not going to get any fame here.

The people making these claims don’t understand something that advanced shooters know: Everything you see took place in the past. Simple Reaction Time (SRT) is the minimal time needed to respond to a stimulus. The time it takes from when your brain recognizes a stimulus, such as seeing the target in the crosshairs, and starting to press the trigger is around 218ms. If you’re making a good trigger press (for example, not jerking it), you’ll take another 200ms. The “ms” is milliseconds. 1,000 milliseconds = 1 second. Therefore, just the time it takes to see the crosshairs on target and to complete the trigger press is about 4/10 of a second.

How do good shooters get splits under 200ms? They’ve already started their trigger press before the sights are on target. But this isn’t about splits, this is putting the crosshairs on target and responding.

There’s also the time it takes for the bullet to reach the target. The distance of the shot is being reported as 400 feet. We don’t know anything about the weapon other than it was an AR-15, so let’s be conservative and assume it was a 5.56 round with a muzzle velocity around 3,000 fps (feet per second). Therefore, it took another 133ms for the bullet to travel from the muzzle of that rifle to Trump’s ear.

The total time is now a little more than half a second. How long did it take Trump to turn his head? Definitely less than a half second. Even if the shooter was a national caliber shooter and could have gotten the shot off in 200ms, that 1/3 of a second total was still plenty of time for the target to have moved enough for a miss.

That round went exactly where the shooter intended it to go. It wasn’t a bad shot. It wasn’t that he didn’t take windage into account. If Trump doesn’t turn his head, it would have been lights out.

The shooter also most likely realized that Trump would be wearing body armor underneath his shirt, so instead of shooting center of mass (which would have been a clean hit), he went for the head shot. The typical idiots are claiming that the death-dealing weapon of war known as the AR-15 was to blame. In fact, if the shooter had known what he was doing he’d have used a bolt action deer hunting rifle, which would have ripped right through the plate armor Trump was likely wearing. We can all be thankful that the shooter selected an AR-15 instead of an effective weapon for this type of shot.

What does this have to do with Montana Gun Rights? Ryan Busse is running for governor, and he’s calling for an assault weapons ban, including AR-15s. If such a ban were in place today, we’d be talking about how Trump was assassinated, not how divine providence or pure luck saved him.