Mon, Apr 05, 2004 page8

• Editorial: Overlooking the obvious

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  Nobody has yet suggested that the shooting of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) on March 19 was motivated by someone with a perverse crush on American actress Jody Foster. Why not? This is far from being the least convincing of all the lunatic theories we have heard.

  Dr. Henry Lee managed to queer the pitch nicely last week when he told a local cable TV station that, while he doubted theories according to which Chen had staged his own shooting, he also did not believe the shooting was really an assassination attempt, "because an assassin would have aimed at the chest, heart or used a more powerful gun."

  In an interview with the Taipei Times published today Lee makes a similar claim: "In my experience, if it was a political assassination, a high-powered rifle would been used. Even if the assassin opted for a handgun, it would be a high-powered one. If the aim was to kill, why not take it to the extreme?"

  It all depends, we suppose, on what is meant by "assassin." If it is a professional hit man, the Edward Fox character in Day of the Jackal for example, then this sort of killer would have used neither the weapon, the ammunition nor the location that was actually used. He would be on a rooftop somewhere with a sniper rifle. On the other hand, if we are talking about a lone nut case, Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver say, such a person has to use what he can get, when he has an opportunity to use it. The fact that he is not a professional killer does not make him any the less a would-be assassin.

  Lee might be trying to tell us only that the shooter was not a professional marksman. But his words have been taken in this country to mean that he thinks that the shooter was not trying to kill Chen. If he was trying to kill him, he would have done it

  differently.

  Balderdash! The overwhelming likelihood is that he simply couldn't attempt the shooting any other way. The shooter couldn't use a more high powered gun because he couldn't get one. And as for aiming at the head, it is pointed out to US Marines in basic training that only one person in 10 can hit a moving target without proper training. If we assume that the gun he used was small -- after all nobody saw it -- and given that the bullets were homemade, therefore pretty unpredictable in their behavior, and also that the shot was pulled off in a crowd amid smoke from firecrackers, thus both precluding careful aim and obscuring the target, the fact that the gunman hit Chen at all, anywhere, is something of a surprise. The idea that he could aim, with a reasonable expectation of hitting, either head, the heart or the stomach is sheer foolishness.

  There is a logical principle known as Occam's Razor according to which of two competing theories, the simplest explanation is to be preferred. Discussion of the shooting shows massive ignorance of this principle. Hearing pan-greens speculate that Chen was shot by bookmakers who wanted to clean up on a win by the outsider in the race is no different a failure of common sense than Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan's (連戰) idea that the Democratic Progressive Party had Chen shot to win the election.

  The simplest story is always the most persuasive and the simplest story here is that a lone pan-blue supporter, possibly ex-military so with a working knowledge of firearms, driven to a frenzy by the pro-Chen hoopla in Tainan and the amazing level of hate propaganda in the pan-blue campaign -- Chen as Hitler, Osama bin Laden, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, etc -- decided to take matters into his own hands.

  And yet of all possible explanations this is the one that is least discussed.
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