On Saturday, July 13, 2024, in the state of Pennsylvania (USA), a 20-year-old shooter was neutralised by the Secret Service after he had released five shots directed at the campaigning Donald Trump. The former president suffered slight injuries on the upper right ear and was treated and discharged.
It is expected that there will be abundant conspiracy theories about the failed assassination attempt. But what comes strong to any keen observer is that the so-called shooter seemed to lack the basic skills or never went through the rigours of sniper training to effectively be considered a sniper. Principally, the failure to eliminate the target despite having the fleeting opportunity to release five shots and the fact that he was easily eliminated confirms that he was not a professional.
In the military, snipers are strategic assets, they are force multipliers as their actions have a major positive effect on any ongoing conflict. By the norms of soldiering, the sniper is a strange breed; he never gets close enough to the man he kills, yet he sees them with clarity and apparent proximity greater than anyone else.
Snipers are special – inside the head; because despite what the action movies daily portray there is within most men – even soldiers in combat – an intense resistance to killing a fellow human being. But snipers by training have evolved beyond that, they have set their emotions aside and are totally committed to the deadly job at hand without any qualms whatsoever.
It is said that they do not have hearts only a lean meat piece the size of a fist that is sheltered on the left side of the thorax. The lean meat is purposely used only to pump blood to the body and has no feeling whatsoever
So a trained sniper would watch his target for hours on end as he goes around doing his business and at the appropriate time, the sniper would kill him, just like that.
Snipers also live in their own private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that the lapse into silence peopled only by our thoughts of the weights of the projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, the strength of the wind, the direction, how far the bullet head will drop over various distances and what slight improvement can be made on the rifle.
When the common infantry soldier uses a rifle, the enemy is normally just a form, a shape that slams to the ground and dies when the bullet hits him in specific areas. The sniper on the other hand studies every tiny detail of the victim before squeezing the trigger and ending life.
It is simply not enough to be a marksman; the combat sniper is a true man hunter. He has the capacity of total concentration, he must remain invisible and he must suppress the urge to ease aching muscles, to twitch, to scratch or even relieve his bladder.
It has been said that there are four levels of human specialisation in anything. Good, very good, outstanding and natural. To be a sniper, you have to be a natural as there is not enough training to make one a sniper. It has to come from within.
Snipers are marksmen, crack shots, and they have silenced weapons with the capabilities of hitting the target sometimes barely out of sight from the naked eye.
The amateur sniper who shot at Trump was said to have fired from a mere distance of 150 metres – and still missed. The average distance for a successful sniping should be at about 800 metres, at this distance, a bullet would travel in about a second, roughly at 2,000km an hour.
So the gunshots would arrive a full second after they were fired. As long as a supersonic bullet stays moving faster than the speed of sound, it will reach the target and do its thing before the sound reaches the target.
It also gives the professional sniper ample time to make a quick getaway.
Interestingly, women, and mature women at that, are recorded to have made better snipers during the Second World War, through the Vietnam and the Balkan conflicts. Their unshakable belief in the cause and their patience probably account for this.
Back to Trump, immediately after the attempted assassination, as per training, the Secret Service swarmed the former president as they shepherded him to safety. But Trump did not allow himself to be unbowed because, in the confusion, he managed to untangle himself from the Secret Service and raise a clenched fist, a sure sign that he was an unshaken man tough enough to be the commander in chief, a veritable invictus.
That clenched fist has probably won him the forthcoming election. Snipers, pretenders or not, are indeed strategic assets after all.
Former KDF spokesperson. jmowuoth @outlook.com