What type of person does it take to be a sniper??

[Spider Jerusalem]

25. Calm, focused, methodical, patient and very self-contained.

Many of the "best" military snipers came from rural backgrounds where they learnt to shoot from a very early age and had to engage in subsistence hunting to help feed their families, learning to make every shot count.

As far as psychology goes? Snipers are apparently much less likely to dehumanise the enemy. This, for instance:

But a study into snipers in Israel has shown that snipers are much less likely than other soldiers to dehumanise their enemy in this way.

Part of the reason for this may be that snipers can see their targets with great clarity and sometimes must observe them for hours or even days.

"It's killing that is very distant but also very personal," says anthropologist Neta Bar. "I would even say intimate."

(snip)

What she found was that while many Israeli soldiers would refer to Palestinian militants as "terrorists", snipers generally referred to them as human beings.

"The Hebrew word for human being is Son of Adam and this was the word they used by far more than any other when they talked about the people that they killed," she says.

Snipers almost never referred to the men they killed as targets, or used animal or machine metaphors. Some interviewees even said that their victims were legitimate warriors.

"Here is someone whose friends love him and I am sure he is a good person because he does this out of ideology," said one sniper who watched through his scope as a family mourned the man he had just shot. "But we from our side have prevented the killing of innocents, so we are not sorry about it."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16544490

And snipers are apparently much less likely than other soldiers to suffer PTSD.