A cousin’s husband I was talking to this past weekend offered me his theory: That the sniper wanted to assassinate the President and these killings were his “practice shots.”
Personally, I don’t buy it. If Clinton were still President, then maybe. Gun owners tend to be politically conservative, and hardly any of them liked Clinton. But Bush is a little too well-liked. The only way this makes sense is if this sniper is current military and doesn’t want to get sent off to Iraq to fight Bush’s War.
I think not only will you get ex-military, you’ll get white middle-class loner, tortured animals when he was a kid, has divorced/disfunctional parents, couldn’t hold down a job, couldn’t get a girlfriend because he creeped them out, joined the military but didn’t fit in and either deserted or got kicked out, and got rejected one too many times and cracked.
If he has any political motivations, it’s that he’s paranoid of the government. He kills from a distance because he’s a sociopath who’s shy or repulsive of people, so he’s a coward. He’s digging the power killing gives him. It gives him the control he didn’t have before. He won’t get caught alive. He’ll either get shot by the cops or he’ll kill himself.
Single white male, ex-military and or conservative-gone-wrong Ted Kaczynski-type. Smart enough to choose a crime that takes time to chase down, crazy enough to do it. A loner who is convinced that he is better than other people and his “mission” supercedes the need for respecting human rights or decency.
Looking for the type of attention he is currently getting.
I hope he is caught yesterday - I hate giving him what he wants most - thinking about him and fearing him.
He probably got his jollies by torturing animals as a kid.
Shooting people at random with a high powered rifle would indicate he is a gutless wimp - maybe a short guy with Napoleon complex.
Probably in his late 20’s.
No girlfriend.
Lives at home with parents, or with close relative.
He may be following the “white truck” from a distance, in a totally different kind of vehicle - using the truck as a shill.
Once caught, he will be an exception to my anti-death penalty stance.
I had a feeling when I said “definately” that someone would bring up the Hillside Stranglers. “Definately” is obviously a strong word for speculation in any case but I think the Hillside Stranglers are exceptional. How about “more likely?” I just think it’s easier to get two high school kids to agree to do something like this than adults. I’m not even sure if the current theory is that two people are doing it.
Well, it was reported today that several of these shooting were very near Micheal’s (craft store.) Therefore, he must be a man who has finally lost it after waiting long hours in the car for his wife to come back from her shopping excursions.
I agree with ex-military, white male, medical discharge from the service (mental, emotional problems of some sort).
My own theory is that he lives very close to where the first shooting took place in Fredericksburg, VA. The killer would have started close to home, in an area he was very compfortable in and knew all the roads.
I would hope for the home-grown nut. He’s probably the easiest to run down.
My small fear is that this is another new form of terrorism. These people have two characteristics: they can think outside the box, and human life means less than nothing. Really the only way they could go any lower would be to try and take out a daycare center or a nursing home or maybe a hospital. They would have to take credit/responsibility/announce that it’s them to have the maximum effect. As it is, though, it’s as good as the next theory.
My big fear is that this is someone smart who is just getting his kicks. He’s found a weakness in society that is easy to exploit at hunting/sniping range – police response time. He’s smart enough to get all his preparations done, have several escape routes, and wait until he sees lots of white minivans around. The biggest fear is that maybe he’s also smart enough to stop. We can’t keep these law enforcement resources on 10-minute alert forever. If he just stops for a while, the chances he gets caught go way down.
He’s got the luck of the devil, doesn’t he? The best possible witness was there, an FBI employee, and she’s the victim instead of giving what probably would have been an ironclad eyewitness description. That was the stroke of luck the cops were waiting for, and she’s who he plugged.
This leads to an evil choice: if he stops, body count stops too, but he isn’t caught. If you assume that he has to get caught at or near a scene just after a shooting, that means more bodies.
So, I’ll take the McVeigh type – hopefully not smart enough to stop and eventually a mistake gets him.
It’s political. This is an anti-gun-law crusader. Someone who’s saying, “You idiots who banned assault weapons, I don’t need a semi-automatic “street sweeper” with a large magazine to be dangerous. One shot, one kill.”
If I were to commit a murder for personal reasons and did nt want to get caught I would attempt to camoflage my act by killing others in what would appear to be the act of a serial killer.
This isn’t my theory on the sniper, but it is what I began to think after a couple of killings and no clues were evident other than the tarot card. The tarot card threw me because most serial killers are highly intelligent, and this one seems to be very meticulous. The particular card left is the “death” card, which only a layperson associates with death. In actual tarot terms the Death card just means change. I think that either this clue is a hackneyed attempt at6 a diversion or noty actually related to the case at hand.
Well, since we’re thinking up crackpot theories, mine would be exactly the opposite:
He’s hired gun commissioned by an anti-gun crusader: either Sarah Brady, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, or Frank Lautenberg.
The jewel in their crown, the 1994 “assault weapon” ban is unpopular and useless, and will sunset in September 2004 - Just 2 years from now.
So they’re trying to scare people and drum up some votes in their support.
How else can you go around shooting a rifle in the middle of town, where people hear you, and not get caught? sheesh.
What? It makes as much sense as any of the theories on the news!
This is why you’re not supposed to drink Coke after October First. Personally, I think it’s a plot by Pepsi to get people to drink that disgusting Pepsi Blue stuff.
KidCharlemagne: High school kids don’t have an attention span this long. They wouldn’t be able to go so far afield, either: even parents who don’t normally impose curfews would have noticed by this time that their kids are always away from home or school when these shootings take place. And as I’ve said before, high school kids do not know how to keep a secret. One of them would have tipped his hand by now.
As pointed out before, it would be very easy for anyone with experience firing a rifle (even someone who just practiced sometimes on the weekends without anyone to teach him) to hit someone in the torso from 100 yards - that’s not a difficult shot, not even without a scope. I’m confident I could make the shot consistently now with about 15 minutes practice and I haven’t fired a rifle (aside from an airgun) in about 10 years. Now, almost anyone who is hit in the torso by a high velocity rifle bullet is probably going to die in rather short order - with prompt medical care you might survive with critical wounds, and some people have in this case, but the .223 is the same caliber used by the M-16 and the severity of the wounds it creates was enough that other countries started questioning whether it violates the rules of war, and we changed the ammunition we issue to reduce the damage. Hydrostatic shock is going to tear up any organs within a few inches of the trajectory the bullet takes through your body, and there’s not much in your torso that can have a tunnel like that chewed through it and still work right.
Anyway, point is it most definitely does NOT have to be a highly trained sniper. In my opinion, if it was someone who had been trained to be a sniper, or even had basic training with rifles in the military, they would probably have taken more shots from greater than 100 yards, and we’d probably not have any descriptions of the sniper or their vehicle.
This person is given the power by God to weed out the evil people. At first we think that he’s just crazy. Finally, in a twist ending, we realize that he was actually right. All the “innocent” people that he killed were really bad people. I’m not saying that this psycho is doing God’s work, just that he may think that he is.
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OR
It could be that guy with the weird accent who “witnessed” the most recent shooting at the 7 Corners Mall. This guy has this accent that I can’t figure out. But he’s been on one of the cable news channels several times. I was just telling my wife last night that I think there’s something very fishy about this guy.
Many people have lived from a torso shot. I believe you are attributing way too much power to the .223. For instance the .223 is illegal in many states to hunt deer because it’s harder to get a clean kill. Common hunting calibers like the .308 or 30-06 have much more power.
We changed ammunition not because of some super wounding ability, but because of a change in barrel twist rate for the M-16.