This year’s Texas Firearms Festival featured, for the first time, Blue Sunday to honor and support veterans and first responders. Proceeds from the day went to The 100 Club of Central Texas and Veteran Outdoors. After a noon ceremony led by Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell and Sheriff-elect Robert Chody, members of seven central Texas SWAT teams took part in the first-ever Blue Sunday SWAT Team Challenge.
Participating teams included:
San Antonio Police Department SWAT
Central Texas Regional SWAT
Bexar County Sheriff SWAT
Austin Police Department SWAT
Texas Parks and Wildlife Scout Team
Williamson County Sheriff SWAT
Round Rock Police Department SWAT
The match was a tactical rifle competition organized by ATX Precision & Carbine and Special Operations veteran Clay Hergert and featured timed sniper shots at static and moving targets, a door breach, and a series of prone rifle shots on ten targets.
After a close competition in which the seven teams were separated by less than 3.5 seconds, the home team from Williamson County SWAT took the title…and won new rifles courtesy Breckenridge, Texas-based Colt Competition.
Congrats to Williamson County and thanks to all the competitors.
Which team won the baby burning stage?
I was wondering if the event included fact-checking a warrant and confirming they were at the correct address.
“fact-checking a warrant”
No time, gotta meet the raid quota to get the Byrne grants for next year.
Was there a stage where the target was lying face-down with an audio loop playing “please don’t shoot me”?
That’s gold humor right there.
IMO they need to modernize these competitions by adding some new events to reflect the new tactics and command structure currently in use.
1. The “Risk Management” drill. The team knows the target’s location, but waits in position while the command delays giving a go-ahead. The more minutes that command can endure the crowd yelling and asking what they’re waiting for, the more points the team gets. This year’s winning score was around 3 hours.
2. The “Securing the Scene” Drill – Takes place immediately after the Risk Management Drill, and is worked in conjunction with a EMS team. 150 lb sacks of red-color fluid are scattered throughout the course. When the buzzer sounds, the bags are punctured. The more minutes the SWAT team members can verbally or physically keep the EMS team from running around to the bags and plugging the holes, the more points the SWAT team gets.
3 The “Tactical reassigning of motivation” drill. After the second drill is completed, the SWAT and their command get points for every time they say or state that they don’t understand the motivation for the simulated attack. Actively misleading the crowd about weapon type, perpetrator’s name, or content of simulated 911 calls is treated with a score multiplier.
ahhh, the classic Flashbang-Bassinet toss.
I always assumed their fundraisers featured a mock-up of this event instead of the more traditional dunk-tank.
How about the puppy shooting stage? Get extra points for head shots on moving dogs?
Some of your people complain that the police don’t train enough and here we have police showing their training and there’s complaining.
All their equipment and “overtime” during this dog-and-pony show was likely on the taxpayer dime. Check what percentage of your county budget goes to Law Enforcement. Its shocking. But we don’t want to not “support” the blue folks now, do we?
80k SWAT raids last year in the US and the overwhelming majority of them were executed against helpless homeowners in the dead of night, whose children might have bought a joint from a paid rat.
Maybe they can train a bit in the use of discretion and respect for civil rights instead of wasting time on this completely contrived and mediocre taxpayer-funded display.
Not to get all SAT on you but, all SWAT are Police, but not all Police are SWAT – even so SWAT’s problem isn’t with kicking down doors and shooting shit, they got that covered.
“First” responders are you and me. These guys are second responders, unless, of course, the term is a subtle dig at SWAT teams which instigate the action …. but even then, their victims are the first responders.
So, let me get this straight. We don’t hate cops, we just hate *bad* cops. We hate when cops fail to train so they can do their job effectively, and what is this competition other than an opportunity to train? I’m looking at this and I don’t see anyone behaving like a bad cop, so I’m not certain what warrants everyone shitting all over these guys in the comments, even if they’re paid to be there (which I doubt, but I could ask around and find out)?
Honestly, I don’t get this peanut gallery most days.
To use an absurd exaggeration, Hitler liked dogs. No one is 100% evil. I bet even Stalin, Mao, and Jeffery Dahmler had good points.
SWAT teams are an abomination, used far more often than necessary. I get the idea that they need to do more than train all year for the one or two hostage situations where their shock tactics are actually useful and necessary, but there’s got to be better ways than tossing flash bangs into cribs and send 30 of them to raid 80 year old grandmas of one pot plant.
And this has been obvious for years to all but the most cop-fellating fanbois. Maybe the Gestapo, NKVD, and kempetai had legitimate uses in their early years, and to join them was a badge of honor. But at some point, they crossed the line, and only the willfully ignorant believed they were good outfits. As far as I can see, SWAT teams have crossed that line, and any cop who signs up must know that their bad use far outweighs their good use.
Again, this is a gross exaggeration, comparing SWAT to the Gestapo. But some people are so thick that they need a clue-by-4 analogy.
I don’t think you’re wrong when it comes to their overuse and abuse. They’ve certainly evolved into something I’m not certain warrants near-daily use. But I think the fault lies far more with the head of the department who makes the call to send in the SWAT, not on the guys who are paid to put on the gear and knock down the door.
You have bad cops out there who shouldn’t be interacting with the public, who are trigger happy assholes looking to ruin someone’s day. But SWAT teams are not randomly driving around neighborhoods looking for doors to smash in. They’re there because someone higher up the chain of command told them to go somewhere and do their thing.
When we call competitions like this a dog-and-pony show, I think that’s pretty accurate. But we need to remember that these guys literally are the dogs and ponies, and just like a real dog or pony show, they’re there because their handlers decided they needed to be there, to show them off.
It has already been decided that “Just following orders” is not a defense. These guys go out on the raids of their own volition. An honorable man would quit and find honest work.
You validate what I said — no doubt many individual SS soldiers were decent people. But at some point, it must have been obvious that they were joining a thug organization and expected to be thugs acting thuggishly. SWAT teams have been acting thuggishly for far too long now for any member to be unaware of what he would be doing, and they get no slack from me.
Chris and Felix, are you suggesting there is ZERO valid use for SWAT teams in the US? Not even in gang-controlled areas of LA and Chiraq? You don’t think gangs and cartels have members who are trained and will defend their money and product with military tactics? I’m not ready to say all SWAT teams are irrelevant and the modern-day equivalent of SS.
Again, I think they’re overused, are doing more harm than good for public relations between law enforcement and the general public, but they’re not entirely irrelevant. “Better to have one and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” But I don’t think the police chief needs to order the SWAT to roll out every time a bird shits on the hood of his car.
“I’m not ready to say all SWAT teams are irrelevant and the modern-day equivalent of SS.”
You should be, because published data shows the vast majority of SWAT raids are executed on drug users with no record of violence, because the record of violence requirement for SWAT deployment was abolished years ago courtesy of the drug war.
To make it more clear, there were a SWAT deployment in Evansville Indiana on a person suspected to run an anti-Evansville PD webpage (and they ended up raiding the wrong house). Can I get a sieg heil?
The justification of SWAT dealing with gangs and “cartels” is nothing more than a fantasy, albeit a standard bootlicker fantasy.
MDS, let me say it again, since people keep reading right past it:
I think SWAT teams are vastly overused.
Everyone keeps giving me examples of where SWAT teams are deployed for situations where they should not have been. How does that contradict with the above statement I made?
I contend that not only are they overused, they are used with nefarious intent: hence the SS comparison.
I pretty much hate all cops. Anyone of such low morals and suspect character to want that kind of power over other people has no place in a free society. There are no good cops, every one of them is a trained liar and a corrupt thief.
I know a number of cops and their families personally. Most of them are decent people. One of those cops is a tool, and not a nice guy at all, and should probably have retired a decade ago before the job completely burned him out. But your experience is not my experience.
Chris, not every LEO is a corrupt thief.
I will agree that they are trained professional liars, it’s part of the job description.
Then when called into court, they’re expected to turn into paid professional obfuscators, walking a fine line between misleading testimony and criminal perjury. No prosecutor wants to elicit testimony from a cop who intends to tell the whole truth in a straightforward fashion.
That’s because the peanut gallery is a panoply.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hold up your first finger on your right hand. That’s how many people you will ever be, You can put a badge, the Pope’s ring, a stained blue dress, you will still never equal more than one person.
If somehow you find that you think you do, then you equal less than one.
If you can keep that straight, and you are a cop/swat whatever, and you wish to serve the people that you swore to, then I will take a bullet for you so that you can go home to your wife and kids. If not, I would step out of the way of one.
[jokingly] They should do a “Shoot somebody and then look for a suspect” drill, a/k/a “The Breaks” [1999] drill. : D
It’s good that the TX festival had the Blue Sunday day, and it’s good to have the pairing of law enforcement and civilian firearms and marksmanship days.