Who Shot ya?

If any one of you is old enough to be a '90s Hip-Hop/rap fan, the title here would have caught your attention for different reasons, But, unfortunately no, we are not going to talk about the famous (and rather controversial at that time) Notorious B.I.G. song on Tupac Shakur.

Instead, this is a truly horrifying tale of two shooters who haunted the people and authorities of Virginia and Maryland states of the United States of America and those of Washington D.C. for about 22 days straight in the fall of 2002 before coming to an end.

Imagine, you are filling your gas tank on a quiet morning, or loading groceries into your car trunk or just simply standing in a parking lot doing nothing and suddenly, a bullet comes from nowhere and kills you! Yes, it sounds like a plot of a movie, but sadly, it was a series of true and terrifying incidents across the state lines and in the span of 3 weeks. 41 years old called John Allen Muhammad and a 17 year old teen, Lee Boyd Malvo carried out a spree of attacks with a sniper from a distance resulting in deaths of at least 10 people before the troopers and the police caught them sleeping in their car one such morning. It is sadly impressive that in each of these shooting, the victims were killed by a single bullet fired from some distance and, in each case, the killers struck and vanished. The attacks were called D.C. Sniper Attacks or Beltway Sniper Attacks. Nothing like this had happened before, at least not on a magnitude this severe and big, where sniper rifles were used professionally to kill random, innocent people without any clear motive!

10 people from different ethnicities, gender, age and background died for no clear motive by the hands of these two gunmen in October of 2002. It took 7 more years for the system to put Muhammad to death by lethal injection and Malvo (believed to be the person behind the trigger), being a juvenile, only got life sentence because of his age. 7 more people had died in the preliminary attacks carried out by these two a few months before the spree and 10 more were injured or wounded as a direct result of the attacks.

The attacks were carried out with a stolen Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle equipped with a Bushnell holographic weapon sight effective at ranges of up to 300 meters (984 feet), which was found in their 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan that they used to move around and across the states. A hole was made in the trunk of the Chevrolet Caprice and was used as a rolling sniper's nest. The back seat was modified to allow a person access to the trunk. The sniper would then lie prone and take shots through that small hole created for that very purpose from near the license plate. What a bizarre and evil way of committing crimes!

Amendments to the constitution in the United States are a very sensitive topic, and such an Amendment (8th, to be precise) is a reason why one of those killers is still alive today! How do you explain this to the families of the victims? It is time, we scrutinize the gun laws carefully in the States and put stricter measures to enforce the laws already in place.

Please share your thoughts on what and how much "freedom" do we really need before we forget that humans are supposed to be civilized species!

. . . and the next time, when you are at a Shell, Exxon, Mobil stations or at a Michael's (or anywhere public for that matter), be extra vigilant and stay alert!