World’s Longest Sniper Kill: The Enemy Killed Over 2 Miles Away

To understand the complexity of the shot, it’s best to start with a sniper maxim: sniping is weaponized math.

Kyle Mizokami [2]

Even the construction of the rifle itself affects the shot. A high quality barrel will naturally be more accurate and the rifle involved in the shot, theMcMillan TAC-50[3], is one of the best around. The barrel rifling, a spiral-like pattern that makes the bullet spin in flight, stabilizing it, imparts “spin drift.” According to Cleckner, a rifle with a right-hand spiral twist will send a bullet up to ten inches to the right at 1,000 yards. How much spin drift would affect the shot at 3,800 yards was essential information for the Canadian snipers.

In mid-2017, the sniping community was rocked by incredible news: a Canadian sniper team operating in the Middle East had made a successful kill at a distance of more than two miles. The team, deployed to fight the Islamic State, killed an ISIS fighter at a distance of 3,871 yards. The shot was a record breaker and more than a thousand yards farther than the previous world record. The shot, which bordered on the impossible, was made only slightly less so by the skill of the snipers involved.

On June 22, 2017 the Globe and Mail [4] reported that two snipers assigned to Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s elite special forces unit, had shot an Islamic State fighter in Iraq at a distance of 3,540 meters, or 3,871 yards. The sniper team was stationed on top of a highrise building when it took the shot, which took almost ten seconds to reach its target. The sniper and his spotter had used a McMillan TAC-50 .50 heavy caliber sniper rifle. According to the Globe and Mail, the kill was verified by video “and other data.”

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