Bob, I am a life-long competetive rifle shooter. I have literally grocery bags full of medals and more trophies than room to display them, won at ranges from 100 to 1,000 yards. I know very well how the rifle game is played and what is "doable".
This 2,430 meter shot by the Canadian Master Corporal Arron Perry was akin to a hole in one in golf. Yes, both are doable. Repeatable on demand? Hardly. Have enough people doing enough of any one thing long enough and eventually something remarkable will happen. This certainly does not represent a level of repeatability needed to convict citizens of any sort of infraction.
Straying just a bit, let's clear up some confusion about Perry. His rifle was the Barret M107, equiped with a front bipod. It has to be: it weighs over 40 pounds. It is chambered for the .50 BMG and wears a 16X Leupold scope. He had a spotter making range and wind correction calls; they had been operating from the same fixed posiion long enough to have made accurate assesments of both. This is done by firing and correcting repeatedly as the spotter and shooter work their way on target. There were
lots of targets. His first shot at this target missed; some say knocking something out of his hands. That he didn't run like hell at that point casts a little doubt that Perry was that close. His second shot hit him in the chest, not in the head.
None of this has ever been classified. I know that adds to the mystique, but there is really no reason for it to ever have been classified. Almost immediately there were articles about this in
The American Rifleman, Precision Shooting, The Varmint Hunter, Rifle, Guns and Ammo, and virtually every other shooting magazine on the planet.
Perry remained annonymous in the face of the American command's desire to issue his entire squad medals in appreciation of their service. They had done a fantastic job, as one of the most effective sniper squads in Afganistan. The problem was, the Canadian command did not want the publicity. One of them actually remarked that "Canadians are not killers"; he did not want to paint them in that light through the publicity the American medals would generate. That, and Perry was quite modest. He did not want anything he did to cast a shadow over the efforts of the rest of his team, so he requested his name not be used in the plethora of articles being written about him.
http://www.riflebarrels.com/articles/50calibre/50sniping.htm
http://www.snipercountry.com/Articles/KillingShot_2430Metres.asp
http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_M107,,00.html
http://www.brianhayes.com/2005/08/world-sniper-record.html