A sniper is a military/paramilitary marksman who engages targets from positions of concealment or at distances exceeding the target's detection capabilities. Snipers generally have specialized training and are equipped with high-precision rifles and high-magnification optics, and often also serve as scouts/observers feeding tactical information back to their units or command headquarters.
Charles Joseph Whitman was an American mass murderer who became infamous as the "Texas Tower Sniper". On August 1, 1966, Whitman used knives to kill his mother and his wife in their respective homes, then went to the University of Texas at Austin with multiple firearms and began indiscriminately shooting at people. He fatally shot three people inside UT Austin's Main Building, then accessed the 28th-floor observation deck on the building's clock tower. There, he fired at random people for some 96 minutes, killing an additional eleven people and wounding 31 others before he was shot dead by Austin police officers. Whitman killed a total of sixteen people; the 16th victim died 35 years later from injuries sustained in the attack.
Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev was a Soviet sniper during World War II. Between 22 September 1942 and 19 October 1942, he killed 40 enemy soldiers. Between 10 October 1942 and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he killed 225 enemy soldiers.
Enemy at the Gates is a 2001 war film directed, co-written and produced by Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on William Craig's 1973 nonfiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, which describes the events surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43. The screenplay was written by Annaud and Alain Godard. The film's main character is a fictionalized version of sniper Vasily Zaitsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. It includes a snipers' duel between Zaitsev and a Wehrmacht sniper school director, Major Erwin König.
Simo Häyhä, often referred to by his nickname, The White Death, was a Finnish military sniper in World War II during the 1939–1940 Winter War against the Soviet Union. He used a Finnish-produced M/28-30, a variant of the Mosin–Nagant rifle. Häyhä had also used a submachine gun, the Suomi KP/-31. He is believed to have killed over 500 men during the Winter War, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war.
A sniper rifle is a high-precision, long-range rifle. Requirements include accuracy, reliability, mobility, concealment and optics for anti-personnel, anti-materiel and surveillance uses of the military sniper. The modern sniper rifle is a portable shoulder-fired weapon system with a choice between bolt-action or semi-automatic action, fitted with a telescopic sight for extreme accuracy and chambered for a high-ballistic performance centerfire cartridge.
Carlos Norman Hathcock II was a United States Marine Corps (USMC) sniper with a service record of 93 confirmed kills. Hathcock's record and the extraordinary details of the missions he undertook made him a legend in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was honored by having a rifle named after him: a variant of the M21 dubbed the Springfield Armory M25 White Feather, for the nickname "White Feather" given to Hathcock by the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
Stephen Hunter is an American novelist, essayist, and film critic.
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko, was a Soviet sniper in the Red Army during World War II, who was credited with 309 confirmed deaths, making her the most successful female sniper in recorded history.
Erwin König is a name of an apocryphal German Wehrmacht sniper allegedly killed by the Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev during the Battle of Stalingrad. The alleged duel between Zaytsev and König took place over a period of three days in the ruins of Stalingrad.
The South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) operated during the Troubles in south County Armagh. It was organised into two battalions, one around Jonesborough and another around Crossmaglen. By the 1990s, the South Armagh Brigade was thought to consist of about 40 members, roughly half of them living south of the border. It has allegedly been commanded since the 1970s by Thomas 'Slab' Murphy who is also alleged to be a member of the IRA's Army Council. Compared to other brigades, the South Armagh IRA was seen as an 'independent republic' within the republican movement, retaining a battalion organizational structure and not adopting the cell structure the rest of the IRA was forced to adopt after repeated intelligence failures.
The South Armagh Sniper is the generic name given to the members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (IRA) South Armagh Brigade who conducted a sniping campaign against British security forces from 1990 to 1997. The campaign is notable for the snipers' use of .50 BMG calibre Barrett M82 and M90 long-range rifles in some of the shootings.
Reports regarding the longest recorded sniper kills that contain information regarding the shooting distance and the identity of the sniper have been presented to the general public since 1967. Snipers have had a substantial history following the development of long distance weaponry. As weapons, ammunition, and aids to determine ballistic solutions improved, so too did the distance from which a kill could be targeted. In mid-2017 it was reported that an unnamed Canadian special forces operator, based in Iraq, had set a new record of 3,540 m (3,871 yd), beating the record previously held by an Australian sniper at 2,815 m (3,079 yd).
Christopher Scott Kyle was a United States Navy SEAL sniper. He served four tours in the Iraq War and was awarded several commendations for acts of heroism and meritorious service in combat. He killed over 150 people. He was awarded the Silver Star, four Bronze Star Medals with "V" devices, a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, and numerous other unit and personal awards.
Charles William Henderson is a retired Marine Corps Warrant Officer and an author based in Colorado. Henderson is best known for his 2 biographies, Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills and Silent Warrior about Marine Corps Sniper Carlos Hathcock.
On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the night before, Charles Whitman, a Marine veteran, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 15 people, including an unborn child and one final victim who died from his injuries in 2001. Whitman also injured 31 others. The incident ended when a policeman and a civilian reached Whitman and shot him dead. At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed 18 years later by the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre.
Apache was a female sniper and interrogator for the Viet Cong during the War in Vietnam. While her real name is not known, she was known by the US military as "Apache", because of her methods of torturing US Marines and ARVN troops for information and then letting them bleed to death.
