That would be me! I needed a relevant thread to post a rifle question in! Is that like saying, who is a cup short of the kitchen cabinet?
I don't understand how the bolt action makes it more accurate. Isn't that just how the gun is reloaded?
Yes indeed when the military employ advance hardware to pin point the sniper location from the sound of his weapon firings and then fired off a few mortar rounds at that location the damage to their morale is not going to be all that great compare to the sniper at least. https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-04/smartphone-app-locates-source-gunfire
There's lots of discussion out there regarding bolt vs semi for precision. Here's one discussion that addresses some of the differences. https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=586244
My neighbor is an expert hunter. Mid September he went up to San Juan National Forest in Colorado for bow season. He saw a lot of deer but held out for an elk rack. He saw one elk in 5 days and took it from 30 yards. Some luck involved with the kill, but some grit, too. Made his den complete. He may go back for rifle season.
Bolt actions have always been more intrinsically accurate than any other action type. It's for a lot of reasons; mainly due to the fact that at the moment of firing the action is completely locked shut and remains so throughout the projectile's travel down the bore. With a self-loading rifle the action is already unlocking and preparing to extract the case before the projectile has cleared the muzzle, and the mechanical harmonics of this action are transmitted to the barrel and thus to the projectile. All else being equal, a properly equipped bolt action will provide more consistent accuracy and precision than most semi-autos.
What that doesn't tell you is that "advanced hardware" still needs more than one shot fired to triangulate the location. First shot just tells them it's to one side or the other. Some systems can zero on the second shot; others take three. NONE can isolate the location with a single round fired. Thus, a smart rifleman makes sure to fire just one accurate round and then immediately relocate.
So, ideal for hunting or single target assassination, but an unpredictable, open, urban, city environment where a president might be? Wouldn't the secret service need something more rapid fire?
The SS also use the 7.62mm KAC SR-25/Mk11 Mod 0 semi-automatic sniper rifle with a Trijicon 5.5× ACOG optic.
They're fine with em so long as they have 'assault rifles' to focus on. Hunting rifles will be next though. 'Why do you need to kill from so far away?' and 'Optics are tools of war.' and so on will be the talking points. Handguns, which account for roughly 90% of all gun violence will be last, of course, because they're also the most popular weapons among voters on both sides of the aisle. Democrat gun owners will then, finally, resist, but it'll be too late.
Speaking of which... Currently assembling parts for an AR15 based 224 Valkyrie XTC-match / long range rifle. Would this be an assault-sniper-weapon-rifle?
You are edging on the part of the incrementalism strategy of anti gunners for morphing and redefining language to vilify, justify, and normalize rational for banning classes of guns from civilian hands as ‘too’; ‘too’ powerful, ‘too’ much capacity, ‘too’ accurate, ‘too’ dangerous, ‘too’ scary, ‘too’, ‘too’.... Where the ‘too’ concept isn’t being applied, demonizing image marketing is being used by conflating negative images and common language to demonize, a common means of normalizing anti gun rhetoric into effective manipulative language, by the anti gun propaganda machine. Hunting rifles aren’t just for hunting, with optics, they are ‘sniper’ weapons. Semi auto rifles are ‘weapons of war’ and by extension, so are semi auto pistols. 50 cal bmg anything is anti aircraft weaponry. Rifle cartridges are police killers; they can defeat body armor. Law abiding gun owners are ‘right wing militia racists’. Violent criminals stopped by civilians protecting themselves with guns are innocent victims of gun violence who wouldn’t be criminals without the presence of guns. On and on. I remember the arguments decades for allowing police to carry .357s and hollow point ammo over the weak .38 ammo they carried with the change being objected to because the new ammo was potentially ‘too’ deadly to criminals and ‘too’ dangerous to innocent bystanders (never mind that a criminal might have better weapons and survive being shot long enough to kill again). The concepts of ‘reasonable’, ‘common sense’, ‘rational’ have all be co-opted to have meaning not based in knowledge of subject, but conformity of thinking to doctrine. Most of the ‘too’ arguments and the propaganda that is manufactured is designed to influence and scare those ignorant of firearms. The strategy is not new, it was best crafted and employed by the Brits over a century. Read the following and see if you recognize elements of the strategy... http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn043.htm When I did subsistence/commercial hunting, I was always searching for the most effective combination of platform/cartridge/load for the task and always looking for the greatest consistence and precision possible. The greatest variation and weakest link I found, was me. When I describe what I went through to an anti gun advocate I find many immediately jump to the characterization of me by the various distorted images that have become common place... reminds me of the propaganda posters the Germans produced to depict Jews in the 30’s and 40’s. There exists optics technology from more than one manufacturer that have built in ballistics computers that can accurately measure and automatically adjust for distance, bullet drop, wind, specific load, barrel length, rifling twist, spin drif, temp, elevation, corialis effect, etc. and automatically fire a gun only when, given all the calculations, a extremely high probability has been confirmed ... almost taking ‘the me factor’ out of the equation. I had a chance to shoot such a platform. It was amazing. But... even before hitting the market, there were already voices suggesting these optic packages should not be provided to civilians; they were ‘too’.
Carlos Hathcock a Marine sniper during the Vietnam War rifle of choice was the Winchester pre-64 Mod. 70 chambered for the 30-06. On his second tour of duty he used a Remington Mod 700 chambered for the Winchester .308 (7.62X51 mm) Both rifles were designed and manufactured for hunters. When Colt bought the rights to manufacture the ArmaLite AR-15, years before the U.S. Army was forced to adopt the M-16, Colt sold the AR-15 in sporting goods stores as a civilian hunting rifle. Colt AR-15 advertising 1962
To anti gun advocates? Do you need to ask that question? Especially, given those posting here? You must be planning something.