Sniper: (noun)
- a marksman who is highly trained to shoot at exposed individuals from a concealed vantage point.
- one who criticizes or complains in a snide or unfair manner.
All hell broke loose this weekend when an American sniper by the second definition took aim at the first.
As Clint Eastwood’s biopic “American Sniper” smashed records, making more on opening day alone than any of Michael Moore’s films did in a weekend, the “documentary filmmaker” (and I use both of those terms loosely) fired back on Twitter, suggesting that “snipers are cowards.”
My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders r worse.
And in a way, he’s right. Bullies and cowards do snipe – i.e. they complain and criticize in an unfair manner – because they lack both the stones and the credibility to confront others on a level playing field.
This particular American, Michael Moore, has himself made a living as kind of a professional sniper. He turns his snide criticisms into films that literally hundreds of people attend in order to reaffirm their belief that capitalism sucks unless it’s buying Michael Moore another house/yacht/admission to an Obama fundraiser.
But in a way, Michael Moore is also dead wrong. Snipers, or as they used to be known, sharpshooters, have always been an important element of military strategy. They are the best of the best, trained to focus on the most impossible of targets. Often they wait for a target for hours, even days, while hardly moving and certainly not breaking to eat or sleep. They are trained to calculate windspeed and how to compensate for it over distances of hundreds, even thousands of yards. And they are trained to do all of these things while keeping camouflaged and hidden themselves, because when the enemy can see you, it can kill you.
America has a rich history of snipers, dating back to the Revolutionary War. A man named Francis Marion, who was the inspiration for Mel Gibson’s film “The Patriot,” grew up roaming the swamps of South Carolina. He knew the land and the wildlife well enough to survive and to evade detection, and along with just a handful of others like him, was able to cripple the British Army in the South. In the film they called him “the ghost,” but in real life Marion earned the nickname “the Swamp Fox.”
But let Michael Moore keep sniping. American heroes from Francis Marion to Chris Kyle willingly sacrificed their time, their blood, and their expertise to afford him the right to publicly sputter over his sour grapes.
