In my last article, I wrote about why I believed that Thomas Crooks was working alone, and was not part of a conspiracy. My conclusion was that he was simply an unlucky person whom life had dealt a sad hand: little in the way of friendship or love, his obvious intelligence applied to a lousy job in a nursing home, his future bleak. He wanted to be famous. He and the Secret Service counter-snipers were already eyeballing each other from the moment Crooks started crawling up the incline of the roof, but he continued on his lonely mission and essentially committed suicide. The main characters of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman are in the same league: both need to prove their worth by dying.

But I made a bow to the conspiracy crowd: “it is odd that Crooks ultimately got his shots off.”

So I’ve been mulling over reasons for why the Secret Service snipers hesitated so long in pulling their triggers, reasons that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of which Crooks was the star. How could they have waited until Crooks himself started shooting?

I make one assumption here. Among the dictums drilled into the heads of all Secret Service people, these three surely stand out: Don’t go jumping on top of the president for nothing; don’t manhandle citizens because they make fast movements; and whatever you do, don’t shoot an innocent.

And you can bet that in just a few months on the road with a candidate or official, those Secret Service folks have seen it all: the guy who, five feet from the president, nervously reaches into his inside jacket pocket and fumbles to pull out his cell phone; the teenagers who get a laugh flying a drone over an event; the nice old lady who jerks the president to her for a hug; the angry citizen who shakes his fist and shouts that taxes are too high. The false-alarm anecdotes among experienced Secret Service people must be multitudinous.

So to be actually, really confronted with a threat, with the one time in all their careers that a true assassin is in their midst, must be for these people a surreal experience.

That said, here are my possible explanations of Secret Service hesitation with regard to Crooks. They are in no particular order.

1. The snipers weren’t sure they were looking at an assassin. There was an American flag patch on his shirt sleeve, which the counter-snipers could easily see through their scopes. Could he be local police? Could he be some state police sniper? Could he be a private-security man hired by Trump’s people? Maybe Crooks made some sign, raised a hand to the counter-snipers; this would confuse them more.

2. Maybe there was indeed a conspiracy against Trump, but this wasn’t it. Let’s say that the counter-snipers and/or the commander in charge at the event knew that an attempt would be made on Trump after the Republican Convention, when the candidates would be locked in; this might make things tougher on the vice-presidential nominee. With Crooks crawling up the roof, however, the calculation was made: if this outsider does the job without us having to stick our necks out, so much the better. So they waited until Crooks shot, then shot him, and figured that they would make their excuses to the investigators later on. Surely the heads of the future conspiracy would reward them for their quick thinking.

3. Nobody from the Secret Service had been stationed on that rooftop, an obvious oversight. Maybe this was the guy, if only a local. Maybe it was Trump’s security man covering the unguarded roof. For it was surely odd that a man with a rifle in plain sight had walked past onlookers and local police; he must have been checked already — or set off alarm bells that would have their colleagues on the stage sweeping Trump away. And again, Crooks’s progress up the roof, in full sight of the counter-snipers, must have given the counter-snipers pause.

4. Any sniper worth his salt would take his shot from much farther back. He could have shot from a safer spot amidst the complex of buildings, with at least a ventilator shaft or a tree branch to give him cover. Certainly an extra hundred yards would make a more difficult shot, but 250 yards for, say, a big-game hunter using a scope, is not a tough distance. And some cover would allow him more time to line up his shot. This leads to the last explanation:

5. Was this guy really committing suicide? After all their training to spot snipers amidst trees, crowds, parking lots and skyscrapers, the counter-snipers were watching a man in dark clothes lying on a light-colored roof. No cover, no camouflage, perfect light, the shot laughably easy. They aimed at him. The guy saw them aiming at him.

I would have hesitated to shoot too.