Thomas Matthew Crooks lived in suburban Pittsburgh, about 35 miles from the Trump rally, and graduated from Bethel Park High School two years ago.
At school he was teased and considered strangeand a few years before the assassination attempt, he tried to get into his school’s shooting team, but – alas.
The Bethel Park team shoots Anschutz single-shot rifles with peep sights and .22-caliber ammunition. The school's range is 50 feet long and 21 feet wide, with seven shooting ranges. Crooks showed up for his first practice “in hunting clothes”fired from the seventh lane – the one closest to the right wall – and hit the left wall, missing all targets completely, or nearly 20 feet. “He turned out to be such a comically bad shot that he couldn’t make the team and quit after his first lesson,” ” said Jameson Murphy, his former classmate.
At the time of the attack, Crooks was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the Demolition Ranch YouTube channel, dedicated to firearms and with 11 million subscribers. In general, an evergreen classic – an offended, ostracized, rejected kid takes the bit in his teeth, starts practicing shooting around the clock, and voila! Hitting Trump's ear from 137 meters without additional equipment, taking into account stress, etc. – not such a bad result!
If they had treated him kindly during the shooting practice, if they hadn't laughed at him, if they had given him another chance or two – and look, yesterday's assassination attempt, which could have changed the course of history, would not have happened! On what thin threads of chance do the destinies of entire countries and peoples hang…
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