Internal magazine or detachable? The Corps says internal; the FBI says detachable.

In 1966 and 1969 the late Carlos Hathcock methodically offered NVA, VC and other combatants on the opposing side the opportunity for early retirement in the forests, rice paddies and hamlets of Vietnam. His tally was accounted for using a Winchester M70, but the newly adopted standard for the Marine Corps by 1969 was the M40.

It is/was a Remington 700 that had a match barrel installed and was lovingly bedded into a wood stock, tuned, built and tested by Marine Corps armorers. It fired a 7.62 NATO round from a 22-inch barrel and used a Unertl 10X scope.

Beginning in the early 1970s the Corps updated the system to the M40A1 with a 24-inch barrel and a few other refinements. As each M40 rifle was rotated back for service, it was stripped and rebuilt as an M40A1. (Heaven forbid the Corps should buy new rifles when the old ones could be rebuilt.) And why the Remington 700; why not build on the Winchester? Simply put, blueprinting an M700 action is lathe work. If you have a large and accurate lathe, you can rebuild M700s for eternity. The Model 70 was not amenable to such efforts.

In 2005 Marine Corps snipers are offering terrorists, insurgents and other unreasonable would-be combatants in the Dustbowl an early trip to the Promised Land. For the most part, they are using--yes--M40A1 rifles. There are some M40A3 rifles being used. As in the 1970s there are some M40A1s that have been sent back for repair or rebuilding. The actions are stripped and reassembled with new McMillan stocks, barrels and rebuilt Unertl scopes.

Sniping rings and bases are not only tough, but the bases are tapered so all of your scope adjustments are used to get range, not just the lower half of them.

The Army brass decided some time ago that they needed sniper rifles, too. Rather than simply adopting the M40A1, they required Remington to provide rifles that could be anything the Army wanted them to be. As shipped, they're .308/7.62 NATO, but by rebarreling them and replacing the bolts, they could be .300 Win Mag--or some other caliber. Yes, I know, you can only do that with a long action, longer than the .308 needs, but that was what the Army wanted in its M24.

What has changed through the years? Well, everything and nothing.

Modern sniper rifles have adjustable stock lengths and cheekpieces, as on this FN-SPR.

First, the nothing. Despite the best efforts of engineers, armorers, designers and manufacturers over the last four and a half decades, a bolt-action rifle is still more durable and less likely to lose accuracy due to rough handling than an autoloading rifle. Taking a rifle out of the safe, putting it in the back of your truck and driving to the range is not a test of a rifle's durability.

If you want to find out how tough a rifle is, do what fellow gunwriter Duane Thomas described as his government job a couple of decades ago: "Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft going 100 miles an hour in the middle of the night with 100 pounds of gear lashed to my body to find out how much arrived on the ground with me."

: The Springfield Armory M1A Scout is a great close and medium rifle, but it only uses a low-power scope, limiting its use as a sniper rifle.

Short of planned abusive testing, nothing is as hard on equipment as military use. If you want a rifle to keep its zero despite hard use, bet on a bolt action. And in long-range shooting, first hits count, and follow-up shots are not a large factor.

Before you start arguing over just what a sniper rifle is or should be, consider who the sniper works for: the scene commander in a SWAT operation or the Brigade or higher command in a military operation. He doesn't "work" for the SWAT entry team, nor the squad holding a building in Iraq. He covers a wider area, sometimes a whole side of a scene (as in SWAT), and reports more often than he shoots.