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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The report so far claims that only Crooks’ head and scope were visible to the sniper. No idea where they got that, or how to reconcile it with the claims Crooks was using iron sights.

well, I missed that tidbit completely. The data really is garbage.

...For amusement's sake, I expect the reports of him using iron sights are correct, and the scope mentioned there is just people embellishing via the telephone game.

I wonder if law enforcement is normally trained to suppress.

Presumably the officers armed with rifles were SWAT, and I would expect them to train on suppressing fire. Then too, I don't think it's a very difficult or unintuitive technique; it's just taking very marginal shots for lack of better ones. There's also no shortage of examples of officers spraying a suspect or assailant down with rapid semi-auto fire, whether justified or not, and the line between that behavior and intentional suppression is nebulous.

The report so far claims that only Crooks’ head and scope were visible to the sniper. No idea where they got that, or how to reconcile it with the claims Crooks was using iron sights.

well, I missed that tidbit completely. The data really is garbage.

...For amusement's sake, I expect the reports of him using iron sights are correct, and the scope mentioned there is just people embellishing via the telephone game.

There's some (slightly) better drone footage out there that makes it look to me like maybe a holosight or similar:

https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1721682308162980.webm

Not a honkin big scope, but you wouldn't need one at that distance. (and it looks a bit bigger than even the clunkiest of iron sights to me?)

Sorry to be That Guy - any uncensored footage?

Yes, I flew down there in my helicopter and filmed the scene in 4k -- but for the Motte I like to post VHS-tier video and blur out anything interesting.

(no of course not, I found that on /pol -- I think it was from some news heli, so the desire not to air exposed brains is understandable I guess.)

To be clear, the shooter was tagged as suspicious (but apparently not "threatening") for using a rangefinder earlier on. They didn't speculate much, but a rangefinder is usually a monocular-type handheld thing, often with a laser, and not the same thing as a scope which is something attached directly to a rifle. So telephone games happen a lot after events like this but actually nothing in this respect so far seems to be inaccurate. However, the thing about the roof slope seems to be fairly well established -- the barn the counter-snipers were on was not actually much higher elevation than the building the shooter was on, and distances and geometry make the angles not very good for the counter-snipers, giving the shooter a lot of cover.