#Snipers

While the current record for the longest “confirmed” sniper kill is over 2,700 yards (just over 1.5) miles, with a .338 Lapua Magnum round, for nearly 35 years the record stood not with a traditional centerfire rifle, but with a modified M2 Browning Heavy Machine Gun, affectionately known as the “Ma Duece”

I, for one, and am pleased to see the steady expansion of The Great War’s video library. It goes to show the power of Patreon campaigns and crowd-sourcing to back up and support great content creators who might otherwise not being able to afford producing. As a result of this, The Great War has been steadily expanding their content including a great series titled “Who Did What in World War 1?”

So you know those anti material rifles we’ve been posting about in use by some of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces against Daesh? The 14.5mm ZPU barrels turned into anti material rifles otherwise known as Zagros? Well apparently, video has come out of Syria and posted on FUNKER530 of one of those rifles turning a Daesh fuel truck into a lovely fireball, from several hundred meters out. Now, I’m curious as to that part, because the cameraman in this video is no doubt over a kilometer away from the target he is filming. But that doesn’t mean that the shooter is co located with the camera man. Terrorist organizations and those fighting them alike use footage such as this for propaganda purposes all the time. So if this was a pre conceived shot wherein the shooter knew the schedule of the enemy tanker and coordinated with a photographer to zoom in at that moment in time, that might be the case. In addition, it might have been completely staged because there seems to be a time lapse between the tanker pulling up, a guy getting out (in this case, friendly personnel part of the gig), then a film cut, and then the shot with the 14.5mm tracer flying from the left side of the camera. This would make sense because the shooter would have had ample time to fire a couple rounds beforehand and thus know the ballpark impact of his rounds, as opposed to a lone shot fired from a cold bore barrel, at a target of opportunity that just so happened to waltz into his sector of fire, and also just so happened to be in clear view in a very crowded city of a cameraman, located nowhere near the shooter, and apparently without communication as well. I’m no ballistics guru, but regardless of how the video was made, the shot appears to be well made, and a good one, from at the very least 400-500 meters or so, most likely much more. What this means for us, is the rifle has proven to be more than some hand jammed antiaircraft gun with a butt stock and scope, it is actually accurate in the right hands. What the coalition might want to take note of, if these things fall into the wrong hands, what kind of capabilities could they be facing.

Wired highlights what seems to be excellent nature photographs. Hidden within them are German snipers, well camouflaged. Can you find them?