How do you get to Carnegie Hall...

no, the answer isn't take the so and so subway.  The old adage says "practice, practice, practice."  It's a lesson that the Commissioner of the New York City Police Department would do well to pay attention to.

In case you live underneath a rock (and if you do, maybe you starred in a Geico commercial a couple of years back), there was a shooting near the Empire State Building last week.  A gunman shot and killed a former co-worker, before he himself was killed.  Nine bystanders were wounded and it has come out that they were all shot by NYPD cops who fired at the suspect and missed.

I'm the first to defend the cops in this instance and say it wasn't necessarily their fault.  One of those pretty little ribbons I used to wear on my Air Force uniform was the Small Arms Marksmanship award, signifying expert marksmanship.  Mine has the little bronze star on it, indicating my marksmanship with more than one weapon.  One of them was the Smith and Wesson Model 15 .38 caliber revolver.  We fired it annually, and out of a maximum of 400 points for the 40 rounds we fired, I never shot below 360.  But I know that shooting on a range isn't the same as shooting in a real life situation, when the adrenaline is pumping and lives are at stake.

But, there's something wrong with a system where police officers, those who defend the public, are required to qualify with their weapons only once a year, and there is no mandate to practice.  Marksmanship is a skill.  There are ways to better simulate the conditions in the 'field' than just shooting a simple course of qualification on an indoor range.  Moving targets, targets that show pictures where the shooter has to differentiate between good guys and bad guys, targets where there are multiple persons in close proximity.

Richard Marcinko is a retired Navy officer who was a SEAL and was the founder of Seal Team Six (his book "Rogue Warrior" is a great read).  He commented in that and other books he's written that during his time at Seal Team Six, his budget for ammunition was greater than that of the entire Marine Corps.  Now I don't know if that was true, or just some hyperbole, but it points out the fact that the SEALs of Team Six practiced their shooting daily.  I'm not saying police officers need to be ont he range daily, but there should be a happy medium somewhere between daily and once a year for the sole purpose of being qualified to continue to carry a weapon.

If it means spending more on ammo and training time, once a quarter, or better still, once a month training sessions where cops go to the range and practice doing something that they will hopefully never have to do is a far better solution that sending nine innocent bystanders to the hospital for treatment.