UPDATE:
Last fall's Citizen's Police Academy was in a neighboring city. This spring, Grancey and I are enrolled in our own hometown's CPA. This one is remarkably different, and I've been very interested to learn how differently two neighboring police departments can operate.
Last Saturday, we went out to the shooting range and fired some weapons. They let us shoot a SIG 226 handgun, an AR-15 that the SWAT members carry, and a Beretta 12S automatic. The Beretta was by far the coolest because they allowed us to fire it on fully automatic. OK, show of hands. How many of you have ever fired a fully automatic machine gun before? It is COOL AS SHIT!!!!! There was no kick at all to this weapon. It was just like a gangster movie - you hold the thing at your waist, pull the trigger, and about 3 seconds later you're out of ammo.
Grancey's brother has been an avid weapons collector for more than 20 years and he's never fired a fully automatic weapon before. So now he's deeply jealous.
We also did the FATS training again a couple of weeks ago, and it helped a lot that we'd both already done it once before. I got a really hard one where there was a hostage scenario at a high school and I was advancing down the hallway to the sounds of screams and cries as these damn kids were running at me from all angles. It turns out there were two gunmen in the school and I luckily got them both.
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Living is easy with eyes closed.
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