Rifle Shooter Quotes

The steel box was opened, and from this came a couple of long guns that were not hunting rifles. They were what Annie Ledoux thought of as school shooter guns.

Legend says Gabriel’s trumpet will sound the last judgment. I do the same sort of thing with my rifle.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

If you can feel it on your face, it’s about three to five. Leaves in constant motion, six to eight or so. Small tree branches in constant motion, about ten. Large branches in constant motion, twelve to fifteen. Dorothy and Toto hurtling past thirty feet off the ground, time to go home.

Thus, the countersnipers are observers and can respond to a distant threat with their .300 Winchester Magnum—known as Win Mag—rifles. The rifle is customized for the shooter who is assigned the weapon. Each team is also equipped with one Stoner SR-25 rifle. Counter-snipers are required to qualify shooting out to a thousand yards each month. If they don’t qualify, they don’t travel or work.

We moved forward towards and then across a manioc field in the direction of a palm plantation. Then keeping among the palms to avoid observation by any lurking VC sharp shooters we pressed on as ordered to a point at the edge of the plantation and just short of a tobacco field. There we immediately took incoming rifle and machine gun rounds that missed and whizzed off through the palm trees. There was a muddy ditch at the edge of the plantation but we could not use it for cover due to its knee deep muddy ooze, so we moved on. Charlie caught us on the move with a fusillade of rounds that wounded two men, and while scrambling to take what little cover available an RPG round came, missed the forward guys only to exploded among those behind with the blood spatter soaking everyone. It was a dreadful sight for sure. Sergeant Walker, author of Southlands Snuffys.

Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are just pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch the hot part. They became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different-size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE! Pistol grip sounds scary, but it’s just a handle. It’s simply how you hold it. Having your wrist straight or at an angle doesn’t make the weapon any more dangerous. This nonsense has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied, “I think, I believe it’s a shoulder thing that goes up.”5 Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law-abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,

White was an old-style lawman. He had served in the Texas Rangers near the turn of the century, and he had spent much of his life roaming on horseback across the southwestern frontier, a Winchester rifle or a pearl-handled six-shooter in hand, tracking fugitives and murderers and stickup men. He was six feet four and had the sinewy limbs and the eerie composure of a gunslinger. Even when dressed in a stiff suit, like a door-to-door salesman, he seemed to have sprung from a mythic age. Years later, a bureau agent who had worked for White wrote that he was “as God-fearing as the mighty defenders of the Alamo,” adding, “He was an impressive sight in his large, suede Stetson, and a plumb-line running from head to heel would touch every part of the rear of his body. He had a majestic tread, as soft and silent as a cat. He talked like he looked and shot—right on target. He commanded the utmost in respect and scared the daylights out of young Easterners like me who looked upon him with a mixed feeling of reverence and fear, albeit if one looked intently enough into his steel-gray eyes he could see a kindly and understanding gleam.

Everything was silent except for his heavy breathing. Steele tugged the helmet off and heard frantic voices coming closer. He hit the riser release, stripped the 1911 from his chest, and held the pistol at the ready. Outside the voices were getting closer. “He is in here!” someone yelled in Arabic. “Kill him, kill him!” The door flew open, revealing a man with an AK-47 who stood there scanning the interior. Steele waited for him to step inside, then dropped him with a shot to the skull. He scrambled to his feet. There was no time to grab his rifle from his pack—the only thing he could do was press the attack. Moving to the door, he saw three more men running toward him, their chests heaving and fingers on the triggers. The closest man saw him step out. He wasn’t expecting one man to attack and his eyes widened in surprise. “Not today, boys.” Steele fired the first round too fast and it hit his target in the hip. The round spun him like a top, but Steele frowned, knowing he had rushed the shot. He settled automatically into a shooter’s stance and reengaged the first target before shifting fire to the other two. Thwap, thwap, thwap. The suppressed 9mm bounced from chest to chest, sending a hollow point mushrooming into each. All three men were down before the first casing tumbled to the ground. Steele stepped out and finished them off with a single shot to the head.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

You whom I could not save, Listen to me. Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed for children walking to school? Those same children also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit, I had one student who opened a door and died. It was the front door to his house, but it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written any name. The shooter was thirteen years old and was aiming at someone else. But a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t distinguish between the innocent and the innocent, and how was the bullet supposed to know this child would open the door at the exact wrong moment because his friend was outside and screaming for help. Did I say I had “one” student who opened a door and died? That’s wrong. There were many. The classroom of grief had far more seats than the classroom for math though every student in the classroom for math could count the names of the dead. A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know, nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how we know what type of assault rifle a man can be, and how we discover the hell that thrums inside each of them. Today, there’s another shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school, a movie theater, a parking lot. The world is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save, you may open a door and enter a meadow, or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be mourned, then buried in rhetoric. There will be monuments of legislation, little flowers made from red tape. What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close like a door above you. What should we do? And that click you hear? That’s just our voices, the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.

It was quite common for households in towns like mine to have BB rifles, commonly called slug guns. These were air rifles that shot very tiny soft lead pellets called slugs. They weren’t that lethal unless you shot at very close range, but they could blind you if you got shot in the eye. Most teenagers had them to control pests like rats, or to stun rabbits. However, most kids used them to shoot empty beer cans lined up on the back fence, practising their aim for the day they were old enough to purchase a serious firearm. Fortunately, a law banning guns was introduced in Australia in 1996 after thirty-five innocent people were shot with a semi-automatic weapon in a mass shooting in Tasmania. The crazy shooter must have had a slug gun when he was a teenager. But this was pre-1996. And my brothers, of course, loved shooting. My cousin Billy, who was sixteen years old at the time – twice my age – came to visit one Christmas holiday from Adelaide. He loved coming to the outback and getting feral with the rest of us. He also enjoyed hitting those empty beer cans with the slug gun. Billy wasn’t the best shooter. His hand-eye coordination was poor, and I was always convinced he needed to wear glasses. Most of the slugs he shot either hit the fence or went off into the universe somewhere. The small size of the beer cans frustrated him, so he was on the lookout for a bigger target. Sure enough, my brothers quickly pushed me forward and shouted, ‘Here, shoot Betty!’ Billy laughed, but loved the idea. ‘Brett, stand back a bit and spread your legs. I’ll shoot between them just for fun.’ Basically, he saw me as an easy target, and I wasn’t going to argue with a teenager who had a weapon in his hand. I naively thought it could be a fun game with my siblings and cousin; perhaps we could take turns. So, like a magician’s assistant, I complied and spread my skinny young legs as far apart as an eight-year-old could, fully confident he would hit the dust between them . . . Nope. He didn’t. He shot my leg, and it wasn’t fun. Birds burst out of all the surrounding trees – not from the sound of the gunshot, but from my piercing shriek of pain. While I rolled around on the ground, screaming in agony, clutching my bleeding shin, my brothers were screaming with laughter. I even heard one of them shout, ‘Shoot him while he’s down!’ Who needs enemies when you have that kind of brotherly love? No one rushed to help; they simply moved to the back fence to line up the cans for another round. I crawled inside the house with blood dripping down my leg, seeking Mum, the nurse, to patch me up. To this day, I have a scar on my leg as a souvenir from that incident . . . and I still think Billy needed glasses. I also still get very anxious when anyone asks me to spread my legs.

It gets worse. Much worse. In June 2017, a left-wing activist, armed with a rifle and a 9 mm handgun, walked up to a practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game and started shooting at Republicans. Sometime before, he’d tweeted: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” My friend Republican Whip Steve Scalise was so badly injured he almost died. Matt Mikaf, a lobbyist and former legislative assistant, was critically wounded and underwent surgery. Another legislative aide, Zack Barth, was shot in the calf. Two Capitol Police officers, David Bailey and Crystal Griner, were injured just before they took down the shooter.

bullet typically travels at about 1,400 miles per hour (about 2,000 mph at the muzzle, and more than 800 mph by the time it reaches a target 1,000 yards away).3 The bullet’s total flight time at 1,000 yards is about 2–3 seconds. Even at these speeds, the typical bullet used in target rifle matches requires about 40 minutes of elevation correction at 1,000 yards.

the best guns for African game are the English Lancaster and Reilly rifles; and for a fighting weapon, I maintain that the best yet invented is the American Winchester repeating rifle, or the "sixteen, shooter" as it is called, supplied with the London Eley's ammunition. If I suggest as a fighting weapon the American Winchester, I do not mean that the traveller need take it for the purpose of offence, but as the beat means of efficient defence, to save his own life against African banditti, when attacked, a thing likely to happen any time.

Twelve-gauge shotguns are unpleasant for shooters weighing less than 160 pounds.

Tex swiveled the FN-FAL on its bipod, identifying the source of the hostile fire. Two men, kneeling on the bow of a boat in the marina. The scope’s cross-hairs centered on the forehead of one of the shooters and he squeezed the trigger. Target eliminated, Tex thought coldly. The man collapsed, the top of his head nearly blown away by the heavy bullet. Next target. Before he could draw down on the second shooter, a rifle boomed from somewhere in the marina and the man toppled over the rail, his body falling into the lagoon.

Plot-o-Matic [EZ-Graf],

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

What are confessions of faith to some are policy positions to others, identical to those espoused and promulgated by the National Rifle Association

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

Here I got rid of one of the most troublesome parts of my load — trading my venerable and battered Winchester rifle for a splendid new Colt's six-shooter with all its trappings — a perfect weapon which has since seen me through many a "close call." The exchange was a most welcome relief, and as for effectiveness, I soon got so handy with the new arm that there was no need for the rifle.

When the bullets started flying at the Seafood Market disco in Tel Aviv, shoe salesman William Hazan’s first instinct was to duck under a table. His second was to open his wife’s purse and grab a gun to confront the attacker—a move that probably saved many lives. “I didn’t lose my cool,” Hazan told Israel Radio from his hospital bed a few hours after the violence. “Thank God I had my pistol with me.” Hazan and his wife were eating with friends at the nightclub when a Palestinian suicide shooter opened fire with an automatic rifle. After Hazan pulled out the gun he’s been carrying around for years, he crawled under the tables toward the exit and dashed outside. There, he saw a tall man hitting a shorter man with a knife and jumped to conclusions. “I thought the small man was the terrorist,” Hazan said. “I was going to hit him with the butt of my pistol, but then I got a knife in my belly,” he said. “I realized I was looking at the wrong man, so I turned my gun and shot the other one.” Because of his quick action, the killer—who had already shot dead three people and wounded more than two dozen others—never got the chance to detonate the explosives strapped to his body. Uri Dan, “Hero Grabs Pistol from Wife’s Purse and Guns Down Terrorist,” New York Post, Tuesday, March 5, 20021

The 8th had a good mix of people, thoroughly American. As Van Fleet noted, it had historically been a Southern regiment, made up of country boys from Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. He called them his “squirrel shooters.” They could find their way through the woods at night without being afraid and knew how to shoot a rifle. When the draftees began coming in, many of them were from New York and other Eastern cities. They knew nothing about weapons or woods, but they had skills the Southern boys lacked, such as motors and communications. “The marriage of North and South was a happy one,” Van Fleet commented.