Trump Shooter and BlackRock Connection

[VulcanWerks]

I am inclined to believe that the BR connection is pure coincidence, and the reasoning for BR pulling the advertisement is purely out of the desire to not have negative publicity as a result of the incident.  This much makes sense.

BR, while being sponsors of many things Trump disagrees with, were also participants in a study which was commissioned by, funded by, and overseen by Trump, so they have a lot more incentive to not be involved in an assassination attempt on Trump's life.  (I probably couldn't say the same for Soros).

However, there are a couple of curious things about this apparent 'coincidence' which probably warrant some further explanation.  Just the sheer mathematical odds of someone like the shooter showing up in any sort of a national advertisement is practically less than getting struck twice by lightning.  And, the 'lightning' analogy is somewhat appropriate here for another reason.  There are people who have been struck more than once by lightning, and when this occurs you have to ask yourself...'what are these people doing which is different from the rest of society??'.  You could pose a similar question with the shooter and the BR advertisement.  Could it be that BR just went out to "Random School (X)", and chose "Random Student (Y)" for the advertisement?  Yes, this is certainly a possibility, and BR would have had no idea at the time this individual would later become the shooter.  However, did the BR advertisement possibly inspire the shooter?  This last question no one has the answer to.

Secondly, people are seldom just 'randomly' chosen for advertisements.  Companies generally have a reason for using certain models or persons.  These reasons can be any number of different scenarios like someone knowing someone else as an acquaintance, or account people responding to a letter of some kind, or any number of 1,000 other reasons, but there's usually always a 'story' behind someone being in a national level advertisement.  If a company is going to spend the capital for a advertisement to be run nationally, they are going to want to put the best possible spin on said advertisement.  This pretty much rules out 'John Q. Public' being used in an advert, and instead choosing a professional actor or model.  If nothing else, they want the person to either 'look' appealing (which Crooks did not), or they want to convey a mental image (triumph over adversity maybe?)  Where have we heard this before?  He was bullied, right?  This was the very first thing reported about him, almost before anyone even knew the shooter's name. 

I don't know the final answer here, but I strongly suspect that if people were to dig a little deeper, they will find that there is a story behind why the shooter was used in the advertisement.  Clearly he wasn't a model, or a professional actor, so what is the real story?

Did the 'triumph over adversity' not work out the way BR and the shooter had hoped, so the shooter thought he'd "up" the stakes?  We don't know, but I can just about guarantee there's some kind of a story behind all this.

You’re absolutely right on selecting someone who best fits the narrative of the creative that was selected.

Marketing creatives will use terms like “a reasonably attactive, friendly and overweight woman” for pharma ads, as an example. The actors are meant to say something about the company or have you see yourself/what you aspire to in the commercial - amongst other more subliminal messages.

I could see how they picked a male teacher to highlight that men make good teachers, too (teacher shortage). They use the “bullied” kid to highlight how they support student achievement across the board and show that achievement is accessible and attainable.

It still just seems like dumb luck though - tens of thousands of others could have filled this role.