1: Have you ever been in either of those situations? If not, then STHU.
2: In every account of snipers I've ever read, there is real emotion involved in the aftermath of taking the life on another human life. Certainly, that emotion is tempered by the knowledge that the poor b-stard on the receiving end of a trigger pull deserved his fate, but that only lessens the emotional toll it takes, not removes it.
3: Snipers are as much in danger every minute they're out there as any infantryman - maybe even more, because enemy combatants target them specifically, largely because of the havoc they can wreak on them.
Snipers are not in the danger of closing with the enemy that a line unit riflemen is. They do not charge or even assault bunker complexes. I suggest you serve in an Army Infantry or a Marine Rifle company before running mouth. I have and I have been wounded twice.
I was a bit confused by that statement too, lumper. What did you mean? Most every sniper I knew understood that he could instantly be a very close-in fight at any point in time. Snipers had to spend long and extremely dangerous periods of time getting into a decent position and then even longer periods of horrifying waiting for the right moment to arrive. They were precision weapons with a specialty that gave a special value in combat and if they did really well, the enemy was reluctant to expose himself anywhere near where they thought we were.
During one short period of my life with the grunts in Vietnam, I was assigned to escort a sniper to his hide position and then cover his rear approach with my automatic M-14. The concept was for him to do the precision killing of high value targets - which he did quite well - and I was supposed to provide massive "smash through the bad guys fire" if we were discovered. Luckily for us, we never had to test that theory.
Killing people's killing people, whether at 10 meters (which means you let them get too damn close), or 50-100m or 300m+.
Our job was killing them and getting us home - any argument with that?