The Myth of the Super-Sniper: Why America Jumps to False Flags and Fantasy Shooters

False flags feel safer than chaos...that’s why people cling to them.

The Myth of the Super-Sniper: Why America Jumps to False Flags and Fantasy Shooters

False flags feel safer than chaos…that’s why people cling to them.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #540: Friday, September 12th, 2025.

Why Do We Always Imagine a Ghost in the Shadows?

Every time a tragedy erupts in America…the whispers start.

“This had to be special ops.”
“No way some random kid could pull that off.”
“False flag. Guaranteed.”

It’s as predictable as sunrise after a storm.

And sure enough, after Charlie Kirk was gunned down, the internet was immediately flooded with hot takes: that the shooter must have been ex-military, highly trained, maybe even part of some dark government op.

But here’s the truth…and it’s not as sexy as cloak-and-dagger conspiracies: this wasn’t a difficult shot.

At roughly 150–165 yards, it’s a shot 10 to 16-year-old youth hunters make thousands of times every single deer season across the Midwest, South, and beyond. It doesn’t take SEAL Team Six. It doesn’t take Delta Force. It doesn’t take “MK Ultra false flag operatives.”

It takes a steady hand…a halfway decent rifle…and basic familiarity with a trigger. That’s it.

So why do so many people leap instantly to the fantasy of the “super-sniper”? Why do they wrap tragedy in conspiracy and myth?

The answer is psychology. Fear. Projection. A desperate need to make sense of chaos by turning it into a bigger story.

And that’s what this article is about: pulling back the curtain on the psychology of myth-making…why people believe what they believe…and why the boring truth…a shot any farm kid could make…will always lose out to the thrilling lie.

The Fantasy of Control

Here’s something you already know but maybe never thought of this way:

People would rather believe in an all-powerful hidden hand than face the idea that chaos can strike at random.

It’s comforting to say, “This was planned. This was executed by experts. This was orchestrated.”

Because if that’s true…then there’s a system. A logic. A script. It makes the world feel less fragile…less terrifying.

But the alternative….that some half-trained…angry…unstable person with a basic rifle can walk into the world and change history with one trigger pull…that’s scarier. That’s harder to live with.

So people build myths. They upgrade ordinary shooters into super-soldiers. They transform random chaos into “false flags.”

It’s not about truth. It’s about control.

The Psychology of the Super-Sniper Myth

Let’s break down the forces at work when people jump to the conclusion that the Kirk shooter had to be military-trained or part of a conspiracy.

1. The Glamour of Special Ops

America is obsessed with the idea of the warrior elite. Navy SEALs…Delta Force…CIA ghosts…Hollywood has trained us to imagine that only the most dangerous men alive could pull off precision violence.

In reality? Thousands of hunters…from teenagers to retirees…make cleaner…harder shots every year without anyone calling them heroes or villains.

2. The Fear of Randomness

If anyone with a basic rifle and a grudge can pull this off…then nobody is safe. That thought is unbearable for many people. So they convince themselves: “No way an amateur did this. It had to be pros.”

3. The Bias of Complexity

Humans love complex explanations for dramatic events. When a big figure dies…we instinctively think the cause must be big too. This is called proportionality bias: the belief that big events require big causes. A random guy with a rifle doesn’t fit the scale, so the brain rejects it.

4. The Allure of Conspiracy

Believing in a conspiracy is easier than facing uncomfortable truths about society. If it was a “false flag,” then the real problem isn’t our culture…our politics…or our mental health crisis…it’s just “them.” That’s a simpler villain to fight.

Reality Check: 150 Yards Isn’t Special Ops Territory

Let’s strip away the emotion and talk facts.

The shooter’s distance…estimated at 150–200 yards…sounds impressive if you’ve never handled a rifle.

But here’s context:

• Youth hunters, ages 10–16…routinely take deer at 100–250 yards every single season.

• Standard .243, .270, or .30-06 hunting rifles…with off-the-shelf scopes…are capable of accurate hits well beyond 300 yards.

• Most whitetail deer in open farmland are harvested at 100–200 yards…the exact range Kirk’s shooter fired from.

In other words: this wasn’t a sniper shot. It was a deer stand shot.

And the people insisting otherwise are either ignorant…scared…or deliberately fueling conspiracy narratives.

The Hunter’s Perspective: Why This Shot Was Ordinary

I want you to picture this.

It’s early November in Wisconsin. A 13-year-old kid…bundled in blaze orange…sits in a tree stand overlooking a cornfield. A buck steps out at 160 yards.

The kid raises a rifle…a hand-me-down .243 with a $200 scope. Breathes. Squeezes. The deer drops.

No fanfare. No headlines. No conspiracy. Just another day of deer season.

Now compare that to the Kirk shooting. Same distance. Same mechanics. Same outcome.

And yet…because it involved politics and blood on the national stage…suddenly it’s unthinkable that someone “ordinary” could have done it.

That’s the disconnect. That’s the psychology at work.

The False Flag Reflex: Why People Need Bigger Stories

The “false flag” cry is a psychological crutch.

Why do people jump to it? Because it explains away discomfort. It creates a villain you can point at…instead of confronting messy truths.

Messy truth:

America has millions of unstable people with easy access to high-powered rifles.

Messy truth:

Youth hunters prove daily that shots like this are routine.

Messy truth:

Chaos doesn’t require a conspiracy.

But people don’t want messy truth. They want a script. They want to feel like someone …anyone…is in charge.

So they shout: False flag!

Don’t Be Fooled by the Sexy Lie

Don’t be fooled by the sexy lie. (I said that twice…for a reason)

The sexy lie is that only SEAL Team Six could pull this off. The sexy lie is that every tragedy is scripted…staged…orchestrated. The sexy lie is that chaos has to be a cover-up.

The boring truth is scarier.

The boring truth is that any angry…unstable person with a rifle and minimal experience can change history.

That’s not a comforting thought. But it’s reality.

What This Really Means for America

Here’s the ultimate takeaway:

If we keep clinging to myths about super-snipers and false flags…we blind ourselves to the real danger: ordinary people with ordinary weapons…acting out of rage…despair… or ideology.

If we admit the truth…that this was an ordinary shot…made by someone no more skilled than your average farm kid…then we’re forced to face the deeper rot.

The rot of a culture that produces shooters faster than we can bury the dead.
The rot of a political system that rewards screaming for bans or conspiracies instead of planting long-term seeds.
The rot of a society that would rather believe in super-soldiers than confront the fragility of life in the gun-saturated U.S.

That’s what this event really revealed.

Not the presence of a ghost in the shadows. But the presence of rot in plain sight.

The Algonquin Wisdom Applied Here

Remember the Algonquins. Remember their generational foresight.

They’d laugh at our conspiracy spins. They’d say: “Stop inventing fantasies. Start planting solutions.”

And they’d be right.

Because the first step in saving future generations is telling the truth about the present.

This wasn’t a sniper. This wasn’t special ops. This wasn’t a false flag.

This was almost certainly exactly what it looked like: an ordinary shot…from an ordinary rifle…at an ordinary distance.

And until we stop dressing up chaos in Hollywood fantasy…we’ll keep failing to address the reality.

20 Myths vs. Reality: The “Super-Sniper” and False Flag Fantasies

1. But 150 yards is a sniper shot!

No, it’s a deer shot. There’s a reason every November thousands of kids in blaze orange put venison in the freezer…because 150 yards isn’t elite…it’s ordinary.

A trained sniper is expected to hit at 800 to 1,200 yards in combat conditions… adjusting for wind…elevation…humidity…and moving targets that shoot back. That’s a completely different universe from steadying a rifle at 150 yards across open farmland.

The myth survives because Hollywood has conditioned Americans to equate any “long shot” with a sniper’s nest. In reality…a $500 hunting rifle with a Wal-Mart scope can drop a deer at that distance with no special training.

The shooter didn’t prove special skill. He proved what 12-year-olds in Iowa prove every deer season: that a scoped rifle at 150 yards is about as “sniper” as playing catch in your backyard is “Major League Baseball.”

2. But he had to be highly trained to hit a moving target!

People imagine Kirk sprinting like Jason Bourne dodging bullets. That’s not reality. The difference between a fast-moving tactical target and a man moving across an open stage is night and day.

Hitting someone at 150 yards who isn’t zig-zagging is the equivalent of hitting a buck slowly crossing a cornfield. Hunters…including kids…do it all the time. The myth comes from action movies where moving targets are nearly impossible to hit… requiring miraculous aim.

In truth, at 150 yards with a decent scope…a center-mass shot is achievable by anyone with basic rifle familiarity. You don’t need military-grade tracking skills. You need a steady hand and the willingness to pull a trigger. That’s it.

The idea that movement alone makes this “expert-level” ignores the hunting reality that America’s rural youth have been living for generations.

3. But ordinary people panic…he must have had military nerves.

Sure, panic can ruin aim. But here’s what people forget: tunnel vision works both ways. Panic narrows focus…and in that narrowed focus…people often succeed at simple tasks.

Criminals…amateurs…and desperate shooters hit targets every day in America…not because they’re calm operators…but because adrenaline overrides everything else.

Look at countless armed robberies or street shootings caught on camera: these aren’t SEALs…yet bullets still land. Military nerves aren’t required for one lucky trigger pull.

This myth comforts people who don’t want to admit that ordinary…unstable people can inflict extraordinary damage. They elevate the shooter to “trained killer” status because the alternative is terrifying: that chaos requires no training at all.

4. But the bullet drop would make this shot impossible without training.

At 150 yards? Please. With modern hunting calibers…bullet drop is practically a non-factor. A .243, .270, or .30-06 has a trajectory so flat at that range that the shooter could’ve sighted in at 100 yards and still landed a center-mass hit without any adjustment.

Military snipers calculate bullet drop at 800+ yards…where wind and gravity dramatically affect flight paths. But at 150 yards…bullet drop is measured in mere inches…and the target was human-sized…not a soda can.

Anyone insisting “bullet physics” proves elite training is either bluffing or regurgitating jargon. The science proves the opposite: this was the kind of shot American youth hunters make without even thinking about trajectory tables.

Additionally, if in fact, this shot was taken from a rooftop…that means the angle was at a downward slant. In this case…the problem of “drop,” (the distance the path of a bullets trajectory falls from start to finish…would have been less than a straight on path.

5. But false flags always use ‘perfect shooters.’

False flags are the junk food of conspiracy diets. They provide easy villains…clean narratives…and “perfect shooters” who always deliver surgical accuracy.

The real world isn’t that neat. Ordinary shooters…with ordinary weapons…achieve deadly outcomes all the time…often sloppily…often chaotically…often with no training at all.

The notion that “false flags always require perfection” ignores the bloody reality of America: chaos doesn’t need choreography. It needs access…opportunity…and intent.

The tragedy isn’t that a “perfect shooter” was deployed. The tragedy is that a society saturated with guns doesn’t need “perfect” to produce devastation.

71 SEAL Team members have been killed since 2001 by foreign fighters. Many of them were killed by someone using a firearm with iron sights…and little to no specialized training using a firearm.

6. But we’ve never seen this before at a political event.

Wrong. We’ve seen it at schools…at concerts…at churches…at parades. The only difference here is the target: a high-profile political figure.

Violence is not bound by setting. Ordinary shooters bring rifles into crowded spaces all the time and leave carnage in their wake. To claim “we’ve never seen this” is to ignore Sandy Hook…Las Vegas…Uvalde…Highland Park…Buffalo…all committed by ordinary shooters…not ghosts in the shadows.

The “uniqueness” of a political stage doesn’t magically elevate the skill level required. It only elevates the stakes.

7. But only a pro would know where to position themselves.

Positioning sounds like expert tradecraft until you realize hunters…paintball players… and even airsoft hobbyists think about line-of-sight…elevation…and cover.

You don’t need to read Sun Tzu to figure out you want a clear shot with minimal obstruction. Anyone familiar with basic hunting blinds or stands has already internalized this logic.

This myth survives because people want to imagine strategy and brilliance where there was only opportunity and patience. Choosing a position with a view of the stage wasn’t expertise. It was common sense.

8. But this looked too clean to be random.

Clean doesn’t equal pro. Clean means lucky circumstances aligned: clear shot…open line of sight…cooperative environment.

Chaos looks clean in hindsight because you know the outcome. But rewind the tape and you’ll see plenty of randomness: the shooter’s positioning…Kirk’s movement… crowd behavior.

A single hit doesn’t prove perfection…it proves the mathematics of chance. If you fire enough bullets in America…some will look “clean” simply because probability guarantees it.

9. But an amateur couldn’t stay hidden that long.

Hunters sit for hours in blinds. Teenagers sit for hours in deer stands. Patience is not unique to military training. It’s part of human behavior when motivated.

The assumption that “no amateur could wait” ignores the reality of hunting culture… where waiting quietly for hours is a basic skill taught to kids. To sit and wait is not expert discipline. It’s what every Midwestern 12-year-old learns their first season in the woods.

10. But look how fast it all happened!

Gunshots are always fast. A trigger pull takes less than a second. The illusion of speed is created by shock…not skill.

Eyewitnesses confuse the suddenness of violence with the precision of execution. But fast ≠ professional.

Ordinary shootings erupt in seconds all across America every day. The rapid pace of Kirk’s assassination doesn’t prove mastery. It proves that pulling a trigger doesn’t require a résumé in black ops.

11. But he must have used specialized ammo.

Nonsense. Off-the-shelf hunting ammo is accurate at 150 yards and lethal well beyond. There was no need for exotic rounds or specialized gear.

The American firearms market is flooded with high-quality…affordable ammunition. Suggesting “special ammo” is like saying only Michelin-star chefs can fry an egg. No… the tools are accessible…ordinary…and everywhere.

12. But the timing was too precise to be coincidence.

That’s proportionality bias at work: the human brain insists big events require big causes. But life doesn’t work that way.

Timing is a mixture of randomness and opportunity. Assassinations always look “too precise” because the successful attempt is the one we see.

We don’t witness the thousands of failed plots…aborted attempts…or near misses. Survivorship bias makes successful events look impossibly clean when in reality…they were just the one time everything lined up.

13. But conspiracies always hide the truth from us.

That’s the appeal: conspiracies give people a villain behind the curtain. But the hard truth is scarier: chaos needs no puppet master.

Believing in conspiracies is easier than admitting we live in a country where ordinary people with ordinary guns can collapse history in a heartbeat.

The “hidden truth” isn’t that they staged it. The hidden truth is that America is vulnerable because there’s no barrier between anger and firepower.

14. But this doesn’t happen in other countries!

Correct…and there’s a reason. Other nations don’t have 400–500 million privately owned guns saturating their culture. They don’t have firearm access woven into their identity.

That’s why their tragedies are rare and ours are routine. The comparison doesn’t prove conspiracy. It proves American exceptionalism of the ugliest kind.

15. But he didn’t miss…that proves expert training.

Wrong. At 150 yards…a human torso is a massive target. Hitting it with a scoped rifle isn’t extraordinary. Youth hunters are drilled on “minute of deer” accuracy…meaning the vital zone of a buck at 150–200 yards.

That zone is roughly the size of a human chest. Hitting Kirk didn’t prove expertise. It proved that with a scoped rifle…a target the size of a person at 150 yards is well within reach for amateurs.

16. But he had to be part of a bigger operation.

That’s proportionality bias again: the idea that big events demand big explanations.

But history is littered with lone actors who shifted nations. John Wilkes Booth. Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. None were super-soldiers. All were ordinary men with ordinary weapons who changed history.

The fantasy of a “bigger operation” comforts people who don’t want to admit that individuals alone can wreak havoc.

17. But they’re hiding details…that means conspiracy.

No, that means chaos. In every breaking tragedy…early reports conflict. Witnesses contradict each other. Media gets things wrong. Police adjust statements. That’s not cover-up…it’s the confusion of crisis.

The first hours after violence are always foggy. Conspiracists exploit this fog to plant seeds of doubt. But the fog is a feature of human chaos…not proof of a puppet master.

18. But no teenager could pull this off.

Again…tell that to the 10–16-year-olds who harvest deer at 200 yards every season in Wisconsin…Michigan…Pennsylvania…and beyond.

Teenagers are introduced to firearms young in America. They practice. They succeed.

To suggest “no teenager could do it” ignores a massive cultural reality: many already do it every fall. The myth survives because urban dwellers can’t imagine it. But rural America knows better.

19. But the government wants us to believe it was simple.

Governments want calm and stability. But physics doesn’t bend to PR. Hunting culture…ballistics…and probability all confirm the same thing: this was not a complex or elite shot.

Believing “they’re hiding the complexity” misses the point. The horror of this event is its simplicity. That’s what people can’t handle…so they invent complexity.

20. But false flags explain everything neatly.

Exactly. Too neatly. Life isn’t neat. Life is jagged…messy…chaotic.

False flag narratives thrive on clean stories: villains…operatives…missions. Real life thrives on grit: broken people…bad choices…cheap rifles.

The very neatness of the false flag claim is what exposes it as fantasy. Reality is uglier …and far more terrifying.

Final Thoughts

The great lie we keep telling ourselves is that only “super-snipers” or “false flags” can shake the world.

The ugly truth is scarier: any unstable person with a rifle and a grudge can. That’s why we must stop comforting ourselves with Hollywood myths and start facing the hard, ordinary, terrifying reality.

Until we do…we’ll keep letting fantasy distract us from the real work of preventing the next tragedy.

Later this evening, I’m sending my paid subscribers a deeper dive…peeling back the layers on why our brains crave the “false flag” narrative…how bad actors exploit that instinct…and what you can do to inoculate yourself against the psychological warfare that is coming.

Trump has already made some statements where I detected reason to think he will react with even more overreach…sooner…than later.

If you thought today’s free piece was eye-opening…tonight’s paid report will take you ten layers deeper.

Be sure and read the Daily Kick…below.

I’ll be back soon.

-Jack

Lincoln’s String of Failures

Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of the greatest leaders in American history. But his life before the presidency? It was failure after failure.

He lost multiple elections. His business ventures collapsed. He had a nervous breakdown. His fiancée died. He was crushed by setbacks that would’ve broken most men.

And yet…he refused to stay broken.

Every loss became another scar…another callus…another layer of iron. By the time he reached the White House…he was a man who knew how to endure storms without flinching. And when the Civil War came…that endurance saved the nation.

Your failures are not signs to quit. They are conditioning drills for the battles ahead. Every loss you survive hardens you for the victory that actually matters.

Lincoln didn’t win because he was born special. He won because he refused to let failure be final.