The author and former soldier Nicholas Irving rated 11 movie sniper scenes for realism. In his role as a sniper for the US 3rd Ranger Battalion, Irving was known as “The Reaper.” In his novel “Reaper: Drone Strike: A Sniper Novel,” Irving portrays the role of a sniper.
Summary and main points
[00:03]
Nicholas Irving, a former 3rd Ranger Battalion special operations sniper, shows how he uses his equipment to get the job done. He applies his DOPE book to his scope, and uses the wind, barometric pressure, the altitude, density altitude, and his DOPE book.
[01:36]
To shoot a bullet through a moving train, you would have to defeat gravity in some ways and shoot through glass, panes of glass, angled glass and different types of glass.
[02:16]
This is a bolt-action rifle that shoots a 6.5 Creedmoor round. It’s good for defeating the wind.
[02:39]
He had a suppressant on his rifle, and I would probably take a bolt-action rifle with a scope, bipod legs, trigger and buttstock. His eye position and cheek weld were perfect, and he kept both eyes open to keep his situational awareness.
[03:26]
Body position is important when shooting a gun. You want to be almost perfectly aligned with the gun, and your skeletal structure will support all that recoil.
[03:57]
Lincoln told the sniper team to take the shot because the colonel had entered the room and told them to stand down. The sniper team took the shot anyways because they had permission from the colonel to take the shot.
[05:26]
Nicholas: It’s a life-altering, emotional roller-coaster experience, seeing your target through the scope and knowing that you’re about to end his life. It’s exactly like sniper school, except the reticle inside the scope is nothing like what you would use in real life.
[07:00]
Nicholas: The trigger squeeze was not really good, you wanna use the pad of your finger, and have the trigger come straight back. It’s exactly how they used it in sniper school, and I would give this one a seven.
[08:35]
The German sniper blends in with the burlap behind him and the inside of the bell tower. It uses snap-bang theory to determine how far away the sniper is and selects known, probable, and suspected locations where the enemy sniper might be.
[09:33]
Target detection is something you learn in sniper school, and this shot is a lot like the Carlos Hathcock story, where the bullet went through the scope and hit the guy in the eye.
[10:20]
I’ve been pinned down by an enemy Chechnyan sniper, but he was 800 yards away. We played volleyball with bullets for about three hours, and the whole firefight lasted almost the entire day.
[10:59]
James and Sanborn track the target to the building, where the sniper shoots him with a .50 caliber rifle. The sniper’s dialogue is OK, but the sniper’s second shot is really good, and the spotter should have called out the miss immediately.
Best Sniper movies
[12:45]
“Lone Survivor” is one of the most realistic movies I’ve ever seen when it comes to combat. I used the same rifle overseas in Afghanistan, and the unit I was part of holds the record for killing and capturing the most high-value enemy targets in the global war on terrorism.
[14:34]
Chris Kyle was a Navy SEAL sniper who was accredited with the most kills in the US military as a sniper. Bradley Cooper looks like Chris Kyle.
[15:07]
For one shot, one kill, I would say that’s extremely tough. It takes a long time for a bullet to travel one mile, and you have to account for the Earth’s spin when you’re calculating the flight time.
[16:53]
Going back, that was a Mosin-Nagant rifle, and it’s pretty accurate for open sites. The range is set by licking the finger on the slide, and there’s a lever that raises and lowers the rear sight.
[17:44]
A good sniper could pull off a five shot kill with a rifle shot, and a .50 cal bullet is devastating at that distance. The men who returned fire from inside basically just killed or injured a number of civilians on the street.
[19:30]
I would have used the same tactic as the woman did, but a true sniper would never take a shot at that distance. A good counter-sniper would have picked out the white terrain and then boom, there’s a black circle there.
[21:20]
Sarah asks Nicholas about the sniper’s gun, and he replies that it’s about as tall as he is, and that it would be uncomfortable to carry.