5280, How about 8120?

The other day I found an article about a British sniper who was serving in Afghanistan around November 2009. The thought never crossed my mind to put it on the blog, until Duncan showed it to me earlier today and suggested I make a post about it.

Basically, Craig Harrison, a Corporal in the British Army, was supporting fellow British troops who were on patrol near a Taliban compound. His fellow troops came under fire from insurgents in the compound. Harrison was able to set his sights on two insurgents in particular, with Ak-47's, and sent two rounds downrange to try and eliminate them. Now, this doesn't sound like anything special, except for that the shot was taken from 8,120 feet away. Don't worry I will do the math for you (I expect the 5280 boys to be able to figure this out quick). That's just over 1.5 miles away, which is absolutely ridiculous. Now, the previous record for a confirmed kill was from 7,972 feet by a Canadian sniper.

Now, your probably thinking "So what, he broke the record by 150ft. That's not that much farther". And this is true, 150ft is not much farther. Except he was able to hit BOTH of the targets, unlike the Canadian who hit only one target (not to take any credit away from the Canadian). By doing some basic calculations, you can determine that each bullet had a flight time of 2.6 seconds. This means that, from the time Harrison fired the first round to the time the second bad guy dropped to the ground, you're looking at 10-12 seconds. Therefore, the second insurgent had about 8-10 seconds to grab his buddy's gun, look around and wonder what the hell just happened (because he never the heard a shot). And while the first guy was on the ground, screaming louder that the pig from Viski's video, the second round was probably on its way. Poor bastards.

But to make this shot once, you need to be talented as fuck, have the scope sighted with dead on range estimation, and have perfect weather conditions. To make the same shot twice within 5-7 seconds apart, well that takes everything just mentioned and in my opinion (earmuffs jimmy and race), a little help from God. I say this because the slightest gust of wind, or minor miscalculation will make the bullet miss not by inches, but by feet. If you view the picture below, you will see a bunch of circles on crosshairs. Those are used for measuring, and depending on how far the target is from you, one circle, or mil, represents 5 inches or 5 feet. Oh, I almost forgot to remind you of how cold it probably was in the mountains of Afghanistan in the middle of November. Just another element of difficulty, no big deal.



I would keep going but I feel if I go into any more specifics, I might lose some viewers. Here is the link to the article.