October 26, 2002

Snipers were own worst enemies

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

An entire nation has finally caught its breath with the arrest of the two charged with the sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area over the past three weeks.
And though the snipers claimed to be "God" in letters to lawmen, it turns out they were their own worst enemies. Clues from their own letters led to their arrests.
An inflated ego has a way of catching up with its possessor, and in this case, that's exactly what happened. Their first letter to police mentioned a call to a priest, and later communications boasted of another murder in Montgomery. When the priest was located, he filled in the gap. His caller had said the Montgomery murder was in Alabama, not Montgomery County, Maryland, where five other shootings occurred.
And when Alabama authorities were contacted, they had a fingerprint left behind by John Lee Malvo, the 17-year-old who was later arrested with John Allen Muhammad, 41. From there the trail led to Tacoma, Washington, where the two were linked, leading to the all-points bulletin for Muhammad's blue Chevrolet.
An alert trucker spotted the Chevy in a Maryland rest stop and the jig was up.
And now that it's over, I feel a bit like I do every time I get behind the wheel of my car. Ever consider when you're cruising along at 55 that you're about two feet away from death every time you meet another driver? I know that sounds gruesome, but it's true. And the same is true for the next nut who decides he wants to be famous.

Were the gruesome twosome really "snipers"?

Sad to say, what Muhammad and Malvo did was not remarkable. Every one of the 10 he killed were shot from 100 to 150 yards, which is a ridiculously easy shot with just about any high-powered hunting rifle, even without a scope and a bipod, which he used.
Even if all assault rifles were outlawed, like the M-16 civilian version he bought, any regular hunting rifle with a scope is just as deadly if used by the wrong hands.
I'm not a sniper expert, but I will never forget the first time I used a .22 rifle with a telescopic sight. I was raised hunting and shooting rifles with iron sights, and from the time I was a teen, I could snipe a small squirrel from the top of a tall tree with nothing but iron sights and an infinite amount of patience waiting for a clear shot.
But the first time I used a scope, I never wanted to go back to iron sights. It made pin-point shooting ridiculously easy, and anybody could easily drive a nail with one.
If Muhammad had been a serious marksman, he would have bought a .30 caliber or larger rifle, which can accurately shoot well beyond the 200 yards range that the M-16's relatively small .223 caliber round is capable of making with any reliability.
Thank God he didn't have the sense to buy one of those .50 caliber sniper rifles our military is using in Afghanistan, which can easily kill at a mile or well beyond.
I am most certainly not calling for gun control, but I think the time has come for every firearm to have its "ballistic fingerprint" taken by the manufacturer and put into a federal database.
This exacting science could be used to trace any bullet or shell casing back to the weapon that fired it, which in the case of Muhammad would have caught him much sooner.
I can't believe any honest citizen would mind having his weapon fingerprinted, and it just might be enough of a deterrent to keep a few more nuts like Muhammad from stepping off the deep end and becoming a sniper.