Something I've said for years, and I know I'm not alone on this, is that they will never come for our hunting rifles. They'll rebrand them "sniper rifles" and come for those, instead.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the shooting at a Dallas ICE facility both involved a lone gunman with a bolt-action rifle. They shot from an elevated position toward their targets from a decent distance away. This was something that made it much harder for anyone to recognize compared to, say, a mass shooting.
It's awful that this second attack mirrored Kirk's assassination, and it's worrying that more people will try it.
However, a recent story at The Trace has me concerned, but not for the reasons they think I should be.
In September 24, a man opened fire on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas, fatally shooting one detainee and wounding two others before killing himself.
The attack resembled the September 10 assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk: As in Kirk’s killing, the Dallas shooter used a bolt-action rifle and fired from a nearby rooftop. Both shooters inscribed political messages onto their ammunition, according to law enforcement.
The killings have prompted widespread outrage. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social after the shooting and blamed “deranged radical leftists,” re-upping his administration’s pledge to crack down on liberal groups he holds responsible for inciting violence. He has moved quickly to advance that narrative, often outpacing investigators who have completed only the earliest stages of their work.
But what might be done to prevent additional long-range sniper attacks is not so clear, according to law enforcement officials and gun violence experts interviewed by The Trace. They said that, unlike many forms of public gun violence, which can be deterred with security measures like metal detectors and armed guards, sniper attacks evade most physical defenses and force law enforcement to make difficult split-second calls even when shooters are identified before they pull the trigger.
“The bottom line is that long-range attacks are extremely difficult threats to guard against,” said Caylen Wojcik, a former Marine sniper who trains law enforcement on long-range shooting and defensive countermeasures. “There really is not anything you can do to secure a public place 100 percent.”
That is certainly true. It's going to be damn hard to do anything about these. While presidents and such travel with extensive security, including counter-snipers, that's not reasonable in most cases. That's a lot of manpower required for one particular type of threat that, until recently, didn't seem to make much sense to worry about.
Yet what bothers me the most--besides the tried to lump shootings like Minneapolis in the category of "long-range" shootings when he was literally just outside the building--is that the term "sniper" is being thrown around an awful lot here. These people aren't snipers. They're just shooting from a longer range than normal, and they happen to be in an elevated position.
Being a sniper involves a lot of skills that these turdnuggets don't have. Hell, the dingleberry in Dallas hit the people he was trying to help, for crying out loud. He was not a sniper.
But that's irrelevant to some people.
Calling them "snipers" allows them to classify their firearms as "sniper rifles."
Right now, even as The Trace acknowledges that 14 percent of guns in civilian hands are bolt-action, they offer vague ideas about gun control. "[L]awmakers and advocates should focus on proposals that make it harder for violent people to acquire guns," they say, to prevent these "sniper attacks," but so far, there's been no indication that either of these shooters had a violent history before their attacks.
So, again, vague recommendations.
What I worry is happening here is that they're engaged in some battlespace prep to, in time, go after bolt-action guns and restrict them heavily, akin to how they have been trying with so-called assault weapons for decades.
The truth is that the very guns they swore they weren't interested in are in the crosshairs now. They're not getting that the problem is one of people and their thinking that violence is the answer to their issues. That's the problem in our inner cities, and that's the problem with these jackwagons trying to kill people they don't like because of politics.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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