Fishu: I thought those who can plug you from 10 yards and get out as if they werent there were assassins
The original word "assasin" came from "hashishin" or something like that - suicidal killers that served as an enforcement arm of a religious sect based in the mountains of Persia untill being destroyed by mongols, if I remember correctly.
The original "assasins" were not interested in "getting out" but in murdering their intended victim and dying in order to get their heavenly reward - virgins, etc.
During "training" they were shown a "sneak peak" at the heaven that expected them with the help of hashish (variant of opium) and were possibly doped on hashish while killing.
If anyone cares to know more about military snipers, there is FM 23-10 awailable on the web.
mrblack: ...in combat the sniper is a force multiplier.
he is a valuable tool to be used to help save the lives of his comrades in arms. So is a torturer - another valuable, if underappreciated, military speciality. The torturers save quite a lot of lives too - by gaining valuable information about ambushes, location of the enemy, etc. And they cannot even boast about their service like snipers do...
It's not the label on a person's speciality that carries value connotation - it's the cause that is being served by his actions.
davidpt40: Humans *can* kill other humans, but its not an ingrained or evolved trait. Right. When a human turns murderer voluntarily, it is usually a result of psychoticism - a largely inheritable trait of character which runs a scale from mild psychotic to sociopath.
Usually it is the action of a state that makes humans kill other humans.
miko