Idiots Who Believe The Trump Shooting Was Fake Or Staged
BY Herschel Smith
3 months, 4 weeks ago
They’re out there – people who believe strange things about bullet ballistics as if there’s some sort of magic to the science. Interestingly, it’s often the people who think they are the most dedicated to science who believe it has some sort of magical properties.
Polling data from Morning Consult shows 34% of registered Democrats believe it’s “definitely credible” or “probably credible” that the shooting was staged, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Another 18% of Democrats don’t know/aren’t sure whether the shooting was real.
Staged. As if it’s possible to shoot << 1 MOA into an ear, and as if someone would put themselves at risk to pull something like that off.
Here are a couple of good videos, but before we get into them, remember a few things. There is a difference between accuracy and precision. Accuracy has to do with how well your gun does at targeting the same view you have in your crosshairs. Precision has to do with how well your gun groups even if the gun is zeroed on the target.
When we speak of a sub-MOA gun, or a 1 MOA gun, or 1.5 MOA gun, it’s almost always an imprecise figure of speak. Technically, we should speak of a gun that is _____ precise (fill in the blank with 1 MOA or whatever), tested with 5 rounds, or 7 rounds, or 25 rounds, or 100 rounds, using cold bore conditions, with a relative error of ___% (or fractional standard deviation of ___).
It’s easy to say that a gun shoots 1 MOA. It’s much hard to shoot the requisite number of rounds with that gun to get a passing standard deviation with the data. A 3-shot or 5-shot group rarely proves anything. The grouping will increase with increasing number of shots (even under cold bore conditions) until the tails of the distribution are filled in and you have met the Central Limit Theorem. I think most readers will understand what I’ve said here.
This is math, and I know what I’m talking about.
It’s a shame that people rely on politics to inform them rather than admit when they don’t understand mathematics. The inability to admit ignorance is called stupidity. Ignorance isn’t a sin. Stupidity is.
Now to the videos. No one in their right mind would believe you could pull off a fake or staged shooting like this to damage just an ear, especially with a cheap rifle using a red dot sight rather than magnified optics.
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