Live patsies are a liability. They'd have given him the Oswald treatment and announced he was killed resisting arrest if this was just a distraction to let the real killer get away.

It's probably the shooter himself, but that doesn't mean there weren't other (potentially deep state) people involved, far too many things about this are suspicious: like the guys doing hand signals just before the shot was fired, the lack of an ambulance or paramedics at an event this size (which by law there should have been), the fact that neither the police nor security bothered to check the roof tops (you ALWAYS check the roofs, it's literally the first place an assassin is going to go), the two people that got originally arrested but were later cleared (one of whom had a fucking pellet gun on him). My guess is that the actual gunman was unaware that there was greater involvement, he most likely had 1 accomplice (who may even be the one that convinced him to do it) who had the actual deep state connections, and of course the 1 accomplice will never be found or identified.

This is all speculation, mind you. But it makes sense for a deep state assassination to keep the actual shooter as uninvolved as possible with the grander conspiracy so that when's he caught he can appear (and maybe even believe himself) to have done it alone. And it makes sense from a PR perspective, if the shooter gets killed "resisting arrest" or "commits suicide" you'll have an Epstein situation where nobody will believe the official story, if the shooter never gets caught there's panic and anger is allowed to boil over, but if the shooter is caught, tried, and convicted and there is good reason to believe that it IS the real shooter people are more likely to feel as though justice has been done.