The Trump shooter walked through a crowd with a ladder, a rifle, and no one saw him?

How did a 20-year-old with a rifle get on the roof of a building used by police as a staging area outside a Donald Trump campaign rally?

Thomas Matthew Crooks, according to published and broadcast reports, bought a five-foot ladder at a Home Depot on Saturday morning.

Seriously, that’s all it took.

The kid bought a ladder, and was able to walk it and a rifle through a crowd of people at a rally for a presidential candidate, and use it to get on the top of a building that gave him a clear shot at a presidential candidate.

Crooks, we now know, after buying the ladder, and later stopping off at a gun store to buy ammunition, drove an hour from his hometown and parked his Hyundai Sonata outside the rally site, the Butler Farm Show, with an IED in the trunk linked to a transmitter, then headed in.

Think this one through: a guy carrying a ladder and, we have to presume, awkwardly concealing an AR-15 rifle, because how else do you just walk around with an AR-15 rifle in a crowd of people, other than awkwardly, made his way through thousands of people heading into a campaign rally, and this somehow doesn’t get anybody’s attention.

We keep getting ourselves twisted into pretzels about how the police didn’t respond when people did eventually see a guy on the roof of the warehouse.

I’m just as amazed that he got to the warehouse with a ladder and a rifle in the first place.

This warehouse building had been taken over for the day by local police as a staging area, which is the next head-scratcher.

Our shooter with the ladder and the awkwardly concealed rifle had to have walked right up to a building being used by police and propped the ladder right up against the building.

Nobody saw this, or at the least, thought it merited attention.

This, again, wasn’t an abandoned or empty building; it was, on the day of the rally, a police staging area.

Let me inject myself into the story here for a minute: among my day-job responsibilities, I am a regular at college athletics events.

I can’t get into a media parking lot for one of these events without a guy in a vest stopping me to check for my parking-lot pass, and there was that one time, years ago, that I left the pass at home, and guess what?

No access for me.

And then, it’s not like, when you park your car, you just walk wherever you want.

There are security people everywhere – and I’m talking, at basketball games, football games, baseball games.

For me to get anywhere near the building, I have to go through a checkpoint that includes a metal detector and another guy in a vest checking my bags to make sure I’m not trying to smuggle some sort of weapon into the premises.

Again, this is for basketball games, football games, baseball games.

Not a campaign rally with a former president speaking on an outdoor stage.

I can imagine walking through the parking lot at a college game with a five-foot ladder and a rifle under my shirt or hanging from my shoulder.

My fringe-media butt would be in jail now, and for a good while into the future.

At this point, the kid climbed the ladder that he propped up against the building being used as a police staging area and got onto the roof, and dozens of people, from the videos that are being circulated everywhere now, seeing a guy on the building, started loudly pointing him out to police.

CNN has pinpointed how long it was that people at the event had begun loudly pointing out to police that there was a guy on the roof to the first shots being fired: a minute and 57 seconds.

Trump was speaking on the stage 500 feet away.

We know now that local police and the Secret Service were aware during this minute and 57 seconds that they had a situation on their hands.

We’ve seen the video of the sharpshooters on a roof above the stage with eyes trained and their rifles pointed in the direction of the man on the roof.

Somehow, no one thought to engage agents on the ground to rush the stage to protect Trump, to order the sharpshooters to pre-emptively take out the target.

Nobody thought, ahead of the event, to place a sharpshooter on the warehouse that local police were planning to use as a staging area, or at the least, have an armed officer stationed there, or to have armed officers in place on the ground in case there was a guy with a ladder and a rifle milling around.

My point here is, a lot has to go dramatically wrong for a guy with a rifle to get a perch above an outdoor stage with a clear shot at a presidential candidate.

It all started, on Saturday, with a kid walking through the crowd in the direction of a building that I think we can presume he didn’t know was being used as a police staging area with a five-foot ladder.

We’re all focused right now on when he got on the roof.

It never should have gotten anywhere near that point, is what I’m getting at here.