No. of Recommendations: 13
In listening to the live video feed of the shooting, I noticed that the shooter's shots had a distinctive echo to them. You can clearly hear that in the first three shots. Shot, echo, shot, echo, shot, echo. All a bit less than a second apart. Then there's about a 3 second pause before a flurry of shot sounds. My working assumption is that those are additional shots by the shooter mixed with shots from the Secret Service (or other law enforcement).
So I grabbed the audio and imported it into my sound analyzer program (I'm also an amateur musician, so I have a couple of audio tools).
In looking at the wave form of the audio, you can clearly see the first three shot-echo pairs. The echoes are a consistent delay after the shot, which you would expect. (Between .21 and .22 seconds, for those who might care to try to find what the echo is echoing off of.)
Then in the next second and a half, I counted 10 shot or echo like sounds. Using the delay from above, I found three pairs that match up to the distinctive shot-echo timing of the shooter. A quick listen to them and they do sound similar to the first three shots.
That leaves four gunshot sounds that I can't match up to the shooter. My guess is that those were the law enforcement shots. There is no consistent timing between any of them, so I suspect those did not echo off of whatever was causing the shooter's echoes and they are instead four separate shots.
In all, I count 6 shots from the shooter, and 4 from law enforcement over the 6 second long event.
The last shot from the shooter and the first shot from law enforcement were just over a 1/10 of a second apart. If that first shot came from the sniper a bit behind the stage (that is visible in one widely shared video) we can start accounting for the speed of sound and figure that the shooter got his last shot off before the one from the sniper arrived. But that's getting off into assumption rather than analysis of facts available, so I'll stop there.
There's also a photo - again widely distributed - of Trump with a smear assumed to be a bullet going past him. That is likely the second shot. The first shot hit his ear, causing him to respond by raising his hand toward his ear. Before he could get his hand all the way up from the podium, the second shot goes past him and is caught in the photo, which shows his hand not yet to his ear.
It will be interesting to see if my amateur work is at all close to what comes out from the professionals.
--Peter
