Quote of the day–Christopher Whitcomb

Sometimes, the most important shot is the one you don’t take.


Christopher Whitcomb
Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team
[Whitcomb wrote about his experience as an FBI sniper. He was at Ruby Ridge and Waco. His insight was extremely interesting to me. It was a bit more favorable to the FBI than what I think is actually the case but that is to be expected. It was well written and I really appreciate him telling the story from point of view of the snipers who were there. Probably the thing that bugs me the most is that he said Marshall William Degan was murdered. This is false. Weaver and Kevin were acquitted of those charges. Hence Degan was not murdered. It’s possible that he was saying that is what they believed at the time and did not intend for that statement to apply in a universal sense. But that isn’t made clear.


I’m probably a little sensitive to that because FBI Director Louis Freeh frequently made the same claim in a context which was clearly post trial and a manner that made it clear that the trial result was irrelevant in his world view.


Ry also pulled a QOTD from the book over two years ago.–Joe]

Share

One thought on “Quote of the day–Christopher Whitcomb

  1. Funny, I read this book in a pre-release “readers” copy that I got access to because my brother worked for a large bookseller.

    It was, at least indirectly, responsible for me getting interested in long range shooting.

    While I also disagreed with his assessment of Weavers case, I just wrote it off to his point of view at the time. I don’t think the guys on the ground were wrong. From their point of view, they were doing their job to the best of their ability and with the information they were given, (which we are finding is less and less in these types of scenarios!) The exception to that, at least in my mind, was Lon Horiuchi, who was either the worst sniper ever employed, or the biggest liar. I’ll continue to believe he shot Vicki Weaver in cold blood until proven otherwise.

    I did enjoy the book.

Comments are closed.