I got the opportunity to participate in police training exercises through my campus marksmanship club, and I learned quite a bit that I thought Gunnit might appreciate.
What We Did: We did a variety of realistic exercises, including:
Hostage situations
Clearing a building with multiple active shooters
Traffic stops
The volunteers from our marksmanship club were the bad guys, and the police were the good guys. To keep it as realistic as possible, we were all armed with Simunition Glock 17s. They're exactly like a real Glock 17 (to the point where I'm sure you could switch the slide assembly with a real Glock and be good to go), except that they shoot marking pellets and won't chamber real ammunition. Shooting Simunition feels like shooting a 22. There's very little recoil. It's loud enough to where it gets your attention even though no hearing protection is needed (unlike a 22, where you should still wear hearing protection). Imagine a large man with big hands clapping his hands together about two feet from your face. I found a pretty good video of Simunition here (skip to 3:15 if you just want to see it shot):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C2lwo-VjPE
So without further ado, let me share what I learned:
1. COPS DON'T KNOW THE LAW.
Almost every time we did a traffic stop, the cop would immediately notice the gun in the center of the floor, confiscate it, unload it, run the serial number, and ask us if it was registered. They even arrested one of us for simply having it. In my state there is no gun registration, and it's perfectly legal for anyone to have a loaded gun in his car without a permit. Seizing the gun and running the serial is improper unless there is probable cause to believe it's illegal or stolen, et cetera. We didn't get the chance to explain any of this, because the cops became extremely aggressive and on-edge the moment they knew we were armed.
Take-home point: Know the law, because the cops probably won't. If a cop tries to do something unwarranted or illegal, feel free to CALMLY make it known that you don't consent to what they're doing, but let them go on doing it. Your lawyer can sort out an illegal search and seizure later, but a resisting-arrest charge is harder to deal with.
2. SHOOTING UNDER STRESS IS NOTHING LIKE RANGE SHOOTING
Simunition hurts. It will make you bleed if it hits you in the right spot, and it always leaves an angry welt. With the possibility of the pain and the realism of the scenarios, I was about as stressed as I could be without being in a truly life-or-death situation.
Here's what I noticed:
Your hands will shake like mad. My front sight was bobbling far more than normal. When I went to change magazines, I could hardly grab the darn things or feed them into the gun because my hands were shaking so much. I am not a sweaty guy, but I had to wipe my hands at one point because I was losing my grip on the gun. It took me a good thirty seconds to fumble my fingers into my pockets to grab a magazine (I didn't have a mag pouch).
You probably won't see your sights. During one traffic stop, my passenger and I were pulled out of the vehicle. My passenger was searched, but I was not, and my gun was pretty well concealed at 4 o'clock in my IWB holster (Crossbreed Supertuck Deluxe). Ten feet to my left, an officer is going through the passenger's pockets and has just spun around to where he can't see me. Ten feet in front of me is an officer who's facing my direction but is distracted, reading the details of my fake driver's license into his radio. I've been told to start shooting if I see an opportunity, and I see it. Time slows down, I agonize for what seems like a minute but what is actually two or three seconds over whether I'm going to do it. Then I do it, there's no looking back, I step to the side, lift my shirt, pull my gun, and fire five times before I can process what I've done. I'm sidestepping quickly, firing, keeping my isoceles, and only on my 11th and final shot is there a pause in the action and I remember that my gun has helpful little posts on the front and back. Cease-fire is called. I wasn't shot and I had hit the cop in front of me five or six times through purely instinctive aiming.
Moving helps. Those who moved, as I did in the scenario above, didn't get shot. Those who camped in corners of the building or otherwise stayed stationary, did.
Capacity matters. When my hands were shaking and I had tunnel vision and I was confronted with an opponent, my accuracy wasn't great and my opponents weren't going to fall over if I just grazed them in the arm. My first instinct was to keep shooting, keep shooting, keep shooting until I couldn't shoot any more. I remember reading that when multiple police officers fire at one suspect they use something like 5 times more rounds per officer than one officer does shooting alone at one suspect. The sound coming from their fellow officer's guns freaks them out even more, they can't process it in the heat of the moment, they don't know what's going on, they just shoot and shoot until the threat is ended. That's pretty much how I felt.
Take-home point: If you think standing at the range and shooting at a stationary paper target is going to prepare you to defend yourself, you're dead wrong. I love going to the range, I love being intimately familiar with my guns, but that alone will not help you survive a self-defense scenario. I'm no great fan of James Yeager, but he did say something that now strikes me as very true: In a stressful situation, you won't default to your highest level of training, you'll default to whatever level you've totally mastered as muscle memory. Participate in exercises like this if you can, take courses that teach defensive shooting and put you in actually stressful scenarios.
3. COPS DON'T SHOOT WELL.
As I mentioned before, stressful shooting is nothing like range shooting. Unfortunately, it seems like too many officers are shooting their 50-round annual qualifications and not much else. Realistic shooting scenarios are even more infrequent than range time. This isn't just anecdotal - one of the officers supervising the training told me as much. Our marksmanship club members were obviously performing far better than the police - in some cases we were running a kill-to-death ratio of up to 5.
http://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/1jnj4u/lessons_learned_from_shooting_at_police_officers/
This is how you should handle interactions with pigs;
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