Greatest Shot ever taken?

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The Great Gopher Shot of 1989....

Situation: Gopher had been wrecking havoc on my yard for months...all methods of deterrance failed.

Solution: Resort to drastic measures and destroy the enemy at all costs.

The Day: Early morning...Pouring rain...buckets of water coming down.
I spot the varmit popping his head out of one of his many holes. I run and retrieve my Ruger Single Six .22 with open sights...and load and make ready. I sneak around the side of the house and from approximately 20 yards take aim at the mound....upon sighting the head of the critter I squeeze off a single shot. Upon investigation I find dead critter in hole.

I'm surprised you guys haven't read about this in some gun magazine.
 
I shot a big water moccasin through the neck once from approx. 15-20 yards away, with my old S&W Model 19 .357. He had just swam across a river and was warming himself on the beach.
 
The shot with the most historical import may have been the one Gavrilo Princip poked in Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
 
Elmer Keith dropped an antelope wounded by his hunting partner, at 600 yards with one unsupported shot from his M-29 Smith & Wesson...
 
The shot with the most historical import may have been the one Gavrilo Princip poked in Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
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No question about that.It was practically at FTF distance however.
Even so, the after effects from those pistol shots at Sarajevo in 1914 are still reverberating today.
 
OOh, almost forgot this one.

I once shot a mole with a pellet gun from point blank range, as he actually stuck his snout INTO the barrell of the gun to sniff it.:what:

It isnt the shot that was difficult, but it IS pretty hard to get a critter to stick part of his head into the barrel for you.;)
 
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The shot with the most historical import may have been the one Gavrilo Princip poked in Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

No question about that.It was practically at FTF distance however.
Even so, the after effects from those pistol shots at Sarajevo in 1914 are still reverberating today.
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I dunno. I'd say there was a shot fired on April 19, 1775 (near Lexington) that is still reverberating today. In fact, I'd say the reverberations of that shot have saved the world from the reverberations of many shots since.
 
Personal best was a raccoon at night. I didn't have my contacts in or glasses on. Single shot .22 with open sights. Maybe 30 yards. Bullet entered neck and broke spine. I still have the tail somewhere.
 
I have to put Hathcocks shot over Furlongs for several reasons.

Furlong took three shots to kill the target. The first missed completely, the second hit the target's backpack, and the third finally hit the target.

Hathcock's long shot was a VC kid on a bicycle carrying weapons. He didn't want to hit the kid so he intentionally hit the frame of the bike. Not a man sized target, THE FRAME OF THE BIKE! Then once the bike fell apart, the kid grabbed a weapon and Hathcock was forced to kill him. Again, a kid, not a full grown man.

Furlong missed a man sized target with two shots. Hathcock hit, maybe, a 2" wide steel tube, then a boy sized target.

Hathcock didn't make this shot with a specially built sniper rifle. He did this with your every day, off the shelf M2 Browning machine gun with a 4x scope he custom mounted on the gun.

Ever tried to hit a man sized target at 2500 yards with a 4x scope?

Ever tried to hit anything at 2500 yards with an M2?

I have. I've tried to hit man sized targets at 2500 yards with an M2 mounted in a turret with special optics and it's not easy.

Not saying Furlong's shot wasn't amazing and I'm not trying to take anything away from Furlong, but his shot doesn't hold a candle to Hathcock's.
 
I dunno. I'd say there was a shot fired on April 19, 1775 (near Lexington) that is still reverberating today. In fact, I'd say the reverberations of that shot have saved the world from the reverberations of many shots since.
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I thought about that shot. But no one knows who fired the shot. It is largely figurative anyway, as the war began that morning, and there is no real record of who fired the first shot. It was familiarized and colloquialized by the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think that the first shot of a war which was happening, regardless of when the first shot was fired, can't be considered as great of a shot of historical import, as the shot that was fired by a known assassin from a known gun, killing a world figure, that touched off an age of modern warfare that redefined the world so completely and utterly.
 
What about FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi's shot when he took out Vicki Weaver while she was armed W/ a deadly baby.
 
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I used to have a coke can hanging from a string off a tree branch in our backyard when I was a kid. I got to where I could ventilate that can at about 50yds standing on the back porch. Well one evening with my first shot the can dropped to the ground and when I went to investigate I had severed the pull tab the string was tied through. I then took my leprechaun,horeshoe and bb gun back inside and watched tv knowing I wasn't gonna do better that day...
 
Hathcock's long shot was a VC kid on a bicycle carrying weapons. He didn't want to hit the kid so he intentionally hit the frame of the bike. Not a man sized target, THE FRAME OF THE BIKE! Then once the bike fell apart, the kid grabbed a weapon and Hathcock was forced to kill him. Again, a kid, not a full grown man.

Furlong missed a man sized target with two shots. Hathcock hit, maybe, a 2" wide steel tube, then a boy sized target.

Hathcock didn't make this shot with a specially built sniper rifle. He did this with your every day, off the shelf M2 Browning machine gun with a 4x scope he custom mounted on the gun.

Ever tried to hit a man sized target at 2500 yards with a 4x scope?

Ever tried to hit anything at 2500 yards with an M2?

I have. I've tried to hit man sized targets at 2500 yards with an M2 mounted in a turret with special optics and it's not easy.

Not saying Furlong's shot wasn't amazing and I'm not trying to take anything away from Furlong, but his shot doesn't hold a candle to Hathcock's.
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I'm sorry, I know I wasn't there and all of that (and know that I'm about to be flamed by swarms of irate Marines), but I don't think that the claimed Hathcock shot could have concievably happened as it's been told. The best M2HB in the world, on its best day, might be a 1 MOA weapon with match ammunition. That's a circle 26.25 inches wide at 2500 yards. Hitting the frame of a bicycle, intentionally, at that distance would be more the product of sheer unbelievable, stupendous, unrepeatable luck than anything else. Perhaps it was an accident, or perhaps it was closer, or perhaps many other things. But that's the equivalent of claiming a headshot at a thousand yards with a Hi-Point: while theoretically possible, in practice utterly impossible to do on demand. Especially under field conditions, without accurate range-finding equipment, using inaccurate machinegun ammunition, through an 8x scope. I'd have to run the numbers, but at that distance the bullet drop would be severe enough that the target's distance would have to be perfectly known within no more than a yard or two in order to hit a 2" target. Let alone one that's moving.
 
Naw, you're all wrong.
The best shot ever has to be when Tom Selleck (Quiqley Down Under) shot that guy driving the wagon as he was riding away. He had to be at least half a mile away. ;)
 
The best shots I ever made were:

(1) taking out a Hind helicopter frontal target at 2250 meters at Wildflecken with an M85 .50 Cal machinegun from the turret of an M60A3 during a simultaneous engagment. The Tank Crew Evaluator told me I was wasting my time as my gunner engaged 3 BMP frontals at 1500 meters. My tracers burned out just over half-way to the Hind, then the API/API-T rounds sparkled all over it. My gunner got all the BMPs in 8 seconds. (My loader was a flash!)

(2) spinning a pig offhand at 100 meters with a 4 1/2 inch Ruger Bisley Vaquero in .45 Colt. The round was a 300 grain JSP "Bear Load" from HSM.

ECS
 
Twenty some years ago, I witnessed a buddy of mine take a lever action 22 rimfire with a short barrel... draw a bead on a fast flying barn swallow about 50 yards away and follow that barn swallow as it flew through a small bunch of young cedars...he slowly began to fire, very slowly working the action...and on the third shot, he F$%ING hit the dam thing just as it emerged from the other side of the cedars!

There were 4 of us there including the shooter, and we were all watching when it happened. It was dead silence for what seemed like a minute. Then the shooter said " you guys saw that right?"

As if that wasn't amazing enough by itself...The moment just before he began shooting was wierd. We were all just horsing around and showing off our shooting skills by shooting anything we could think of. You know, trying to keep a tin can hopping down the road without missing or letting it come to rest, that sort of thing.

But when he spotted that bird, and put the butt to his shoulder, everyone froze and turned to look at what he was looking at. His face was like that of a cat about to pounce. I can't describe it in words. But there was such a change in him and such freaky look of concentration that it actually took your breath away, and I remember actually thinking "he's going to do it" before he actually did it. And then he did it.

I'll never forget it.
 
Naw, you're all wrong.
The best shot ever has to be when Tom Selleck (Quiqley Down Under) shot that guy driving the wagon as he was riding away. He had to be at least half a mile away.
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Well,if we're gonna go to the movies,how about Clint Eastwood,shooting off hand, firing that shot from several football fields away and cutting the rope off from around Eli Wallach's throat in "The Good,the Bad and the Ugly?
 
best shot taken? Well mine of course. I shot at the moon! I'll have to have an astronaut get up there to check if I hit it. But, I did take the shot!
 
For some reason some people don't realize that Oswald quite simply got lucky.

He was nothing special as a marksman.
 
You guys realize that the shot Oswald made from the bookstore window was hardly comparable to Billy Dixon's or anything else, really?
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+1

The distance was like...what...70 yards?

Most country boys I know who grew up shootin' table meat coulda made the Oswald/Kennedy shots with an iron-sighted Winchester .30-30 carbine.
 
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