One unknown sniper in suburban Washington D.C. has fired ten rounds resulting in eight people dead and two wounded. One of the wounded, a 13 year old boy, is in critical condition and might not make it.
As nerve wracking as the thought of a shadowy and elusive sniper lurking in the suburbs is, neither the number of victims nor the fact that some whack-job would do this are remarkable. What is truly remarkable is the sniper’s skill.
And we’re not referring to the quality of his marksmanship.
The sniper’s use of the .223 round, a relatively light and inaccurate round at long distances, led us to believe that this person was not elite ex-military/ex-S.W.A.T. A more seasoned sniper’s round of choice would be the heavier .308, or the truck-stopping .50, if we had a serious professional on our hands. Moreover, this sniper took all of his shots at distances of little more than 100 yards, no small feat, for sure, but not too difficult for even the average hunter with a good scope.
What we’re referring to are this sniper’s skill at blending in, and fading out. These skills are not quite the same as required for hunting deer, or chilling at the local gun club. Urban environments are often noisy, chaotic, and filled with nosy people and cops. Evading capture for so long, with no witnesses, albeit in an environment that can also afford equal amounts of anonymity, is not the work of some two-bit Columbine clone.
The sniper is a soldier. Until the discovery of the tarot card, he could have been a soldier from anywhere on the planet. The tarot card, however, has given strong evidence to the possibility that the sniper is a white U.S. American soldier. Only white Americans have enough self-righteousness and bullshit sanctimony to declare “Dear policeman: I am God.”
We believe that the tarot card was really dropped by the sniper. He has nothing to lose by doing such obnoxious gloating. The sniper sees everyone, nobody sees him. The only other possibility is the tarot card really came from God and is a mere coincidence to the sniper attacks.
So we have a picture of a white-bread American megalomaniac sniper-soldier with obvious grievances against everybody. It almost sounds like Timothy McVeigh except that McVeigh had relatively more class than the current enemy of the state.
McVeigh had his issues spelled out: he was upset about Waco, he was upset about Ruby Ridge, he felt that the FBI, ATF, DEA, and various other Gestapo agencies were running around acting like paramilitary organizations and were, therefore, valid military targets. Call it what you will. His rationale has made him a martyr to a lot of disaffected folks in our country’s rugged backyard. Even in a world where McVeigh was never caught or killed before explaining himself, deducing his motives would not have been difficult.
Deducing this egghead’s motives may not prove too difficult, either.
This past summer, within an eight-week period at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, Special Operations soldiers returning from Afghanistan committed three murders –they killed their wives, shooting and brutally beating, strangling, stabbing, and mangling them; one wife shot her husband, also returned from a stint with Special Ops in Afghanistan, in the chest and head as he slept.
If this sniper turns out to be a U.S. soldier, we bet that he served with distinction in Afghanistan.
