The Goat Pen

eCat wrote:65.4 Million Gun Purchases Since Obama Took Office, 91% More Than Bush's First-Term Total

65 Million legally purchased firearms, and prices were significantly cheaper during the Bush administration

"We would go kill high-value targets every night," the Shooter tells me. He and other ST6 members who would later be on the Abbottabad trip lived in rough huts with mud floors and cots. "But we were completely disrupting Al Qaeda and other Iraqi networks. If we only killed five or six guys a night, we were wasting our time. We knew this was the greatest moment of our operational lives."

From Al Asad to Ramadi to Baghdad to Baquba—Al Qaeda central at the time—the SEALs had latitude to go after "everyone we thought we had to kill. That's really a major reason the surge was going so well, because terrorists were dying strategically."

During one raid, accompanied by two dogs, the Shooter says that he and his team wiped out "an entire spiderweb network." Villagers told Iraqi newspapers the next day that "Ninjas came with lions."

It is important to him to stress that no women or children were killed in that raid. He also insists that when it came to interrogation, repetitive questioning and leveraging fear was as aggressive as he'd go. "When we first started the war in Iraq, we were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them," the Shooter says. "Metallica got wind of this and they said, 'Hey, please don't use our music because we don't want to promote violence.' I thought, Dude, you have an album called Kill 'Em All.

"But we stopped using their music, and then a band called Demon Hunter got in touch and said, 'We're all about promoting what you do.' They sent us CDs and patches. I wore my Demon Hunter patch on every mission. I wore it when I blasted bin Laden."