LOL indeed.
How Canada’s small military produced deadly, record-breaking snipers
In particular, Canada boasts some of the best snipers of any military, and the world may very well have gotten another reminder of that this week.
On Thursday, the country’s military said that a Canadian Special Operations sniper had shot an Islamic State fighter in Iraq from more than two miles away, purportedly breaking a world record for the longest confirmed kill shot in history, according to the
Globe and Mail.
An unidentified sniper from the elite Joint Task Force 2 made the shot from a distance of 3,540 meters using a U.S.-made McMillan Tac-50 rifle, according to the Globe and Mail. The Canadian military provided no details about the operation, nor did it say whether the human target was killed, as
The Washington Post reported. But the Globe and Mail cited anonymous military sources saying that the fatal shot, made from a high-rise building during an operation in Iraq, was independently verified by video and other data.
The Post’s Thomas Gibbons-Neff described the extreme difficulty of hitting an enemy combatant at such a distance, let alone fatally wounding one:
For the soldier to hit his target 3,540 meters (3,871 yards) he would need to account for every atmospheric factor available. Wind speed, temperature, barometric pressure, the bullets yaw and the rotation of the earth would all need to be considered before pulling the trigger. These variables, once harnessed from devices such as a handheld weather meter and potentially range-finding equipment on the gun, would then be processed through a ballistic calculator that would let the shooter make the necessary adjustments on the rifle’s scope.
If all that went according to plan and the insurgent was indeed killed, the Canadian sniper’s shot shatters the previous world record, held by a British soldier, by a
staggering 1,065 meters.
:format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/49561659/usa-today-8927163.0.jpg)
