has anyone ever tried to assasinate someone by “lobbing” a bullet at them? by this i mean, someone who stands 2 miles or so away, aims a rifle at the proper angle, and fires, hoping to hit the guy? i would think with high capacity magazines and rapid fire weaponry, the enough shots could be fired to give the assasin a chance. note: not trying to sound morbid or edgy, just wondering historically if anyone has tried this and if it’s feasible
The biggest drawback to your method is finding a clear line of sight. People are usually assasinated when they are in public at some event. Trying to find a clear line 2 miles away to fire a weapon from would not be possible in most cases, unless they are standing alone in the salt flats perhaps.
Plus it’d take several seconds for a bullet to travel two miles (muzzle velocity of a .50cal M2 is about 3000fps IIRC and it don’t get faster downrange) so your target would have to stand pretty still for a while.
The old British Vickers water-cooled machinegun did come with a special sight and tripod that could be used for indirect fire at targets several miles away, however keep in mind that’s an automatic weapon laying down supression fire on a group of enemy soldiers, not a sniper rifle being used against one person.
The M82 sniper rifle uses a .50 cal round and has an effective range (against soft targets - the range against armor is much shorter) of, get this, 7450 yards or well over four miles. It’s used primarily to take out armored targets and fixed installations, not for individual kills, though. A classic example of a selected target is the control box of a mobile SCUD launcher. Take that out and the entire system becomes useless; a more effective tactic than trying to tag an individual enemy soldier.
I’m missing the “perfect” aspect of this crime? Maybe I’ve been watching too much CSI (or not enough), but I’d think they could still run ballistics tests on the bullet, determine the angle from which the shot originated and the distance it travelled, and have a pretty good shot at catching you.
(C’mon, like you could have passed up the pun?)
Wierd. I just heard a US General talking about the troops being under “indirect fire.” I was trying to figure out what that meant.
The downside to this plan is a parameter called CEP (“circular error probable”), which is the radius of a circle inside which 50% of your aimed rounds will fall. Every ballistic weapon has minor inaccuracies; artillery, because it’s aimed by well-characterized servo motors and the powder charge is precisely measured out, tends to have a small CEP. A requirement for one such system is a 60-meter CEP over a 25,000 meter firing distance, with weather data no older than two hours old, in any cloud condition, with “unconditioned” rounds (not polished or cleaned). That means that with all of those vagaries, they consider it really great if they can land half of their rounds within 60m of the aim-point.
There is probably a one-foot diameter circle where your target is standing into which a bullet can fall from above and kill him. To put a bullet on that circle, you need to know your position, the position of that circle, how many grains of powder are in your cartridge, how clean the barrel is, the exact muzzle velocity of your weapon, the precise angle you intend to set the barrel, the density and winds of all the intervening air… and probably a few other things I haven’t thought of.
I won’t dismiss it out of hand, but you’re going to have to do your homework before you try this. 
That also includes mortars, by the way.