Yesterday's assassination attempt on President Trump has stunned the world. We thank God that President Trump came out OK, knowing that just a few millimeters of difference could have resulted in a deadly outcome. While the profoundly unsettling event in Butler, Pennsylvania, opens up a whole host of troubling questions, which we will of course address here in due course, the most pressing and immediate one is how this could have happened in the first place. How on earth could the Secret Service have screwed up so badly?

To get a sense of how bad the screw-up was (assuming it was indeed a screw-up and not something more sinister), it is helpful to understand some facts. One might at first imagine that in order for a gunman to get within shooting distance of President Trump, he must have employed sophisticated concealment methods of the sort usually reserved for spy films. Except this wasn't the case at all. The shooter was perched on top of a building 150 yards away from where Trump was speaking. Law enforcement experts familiar with security protocols are simply baffled that one of the few rooftops near Trump wasn't secured, much less how a man could get up there with a rifle and have time to take a shot.

Even those with no security experience whatsoever can look at the image and understand that it would be a no-brainer to secure the rooftop in question.