Talk:Sharpshooter

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Terminology

What's the difference between a sharpshooter and a marksman? Is the former just a historical term or "predecessor" for the latter? Articles in other languages also seem to be a bit weird about the difference, e.g., the Russian article is just a transliteration of the English word instead of being a translation. The German article "Scharfschütze" (quite literally "sharpshooter" if translated) is linked to the English "marksman" article instead of this sharpshooter article despite the apparent similarity of the words sharpshooter and Scharfschütze. Nakonana (talk) 16:49, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To a broad extent colloquially they're synonyms, but professionally they have slightly different connotations in historical usage around the U.S. military. While both terms can be used relatively interchangeably to refer to a very accurate-shooting individual (e.g. "John is a sharpshooter" and "Bob is a marksman") or a group of those people ("What marksmen!"/"Those Florida boys sure are sharpshooters"), "sharpshooters" was additionally an early military designation or title for a unit organized around the capability of delivering accurate long-ranged gunfire (e.g. "The 1st Georgia Sharpshooter Battalion"); whereas "marksmen" was not. This would have made sense at a time when the average musket had terrible accuracy which meant that battles were conducted by line infantry in the Napoleonic style at very close range. Sharpshooter units typically had rifles, not muskets, and were capable of engaging accurately at significantly further ranges than line infantry units could. So, during the period prior to the advent of the modern rifle towards the end of the 19th century, this distinction was much more clear and made a lot of sense. However, by the 20th century that trend had reversed; the Napoleonic model had been mostly abandoned due to the range and accuracy of the now-widely spread rifled barrel, leading to the adoption of non-homogenous small units like we have today, which led to the decline of dedicated "sharpshooter" formations. By WWI, "sharpshooter" as a term had essentially died out of professional usage while "marksman" became a formal designation to indicate a role responsible for precision fire but not the concealment of a sniper. Finally, to further confuse things, the U.S. military also issues medals for meeting certain performance scores in annual weapons qualifications -- the lowest level being "marksman" and the middle level being "sharpshooter." So, I guess it's probably accurate to say that sharpshooter is a more antiquated predecessor of the more common "marksman" term. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 20:29, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's a paragraph on the Sniper article about the origins of the German Scharfschütze term, that we could probably use to improve this page as well. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 20:32, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]