ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Snipers: High-Tech White Knights
In an op-ed, former Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter – author of a series of novels featuring sniper Bob Lee Swagger – makes the case that “we are in the golden age of the sniper” in which “[t]echnology and necessity have combined to make the sniper the go-to guy in military operations, even given him a kind of glamour”:
He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.
We vest in him the right to kill in our name and it seems, at least to some extent, we no longer hold it against him that he does so from a long way out, usually in darkness and silence. Instead, we wish him godspeed. He's no longer Lee Harvey Oswald. He's Carlos Hatchcock, the legendary Marine Corps sniper, or Chuck Mawhinney, who holds the Marine Corps sniper kill record in
Hunter notes that “new optical hardware and ballistic innovations have made the sniper more effective than he's ever been” thanks to “heavier-caliber weapons [that] greatly further the shooter's range.”
Comments