Recently, “are there snipers at sporting events” questions took on new meaning after an intensive training exercise held in a Colorado football stadium. At this event, police snipers from all across the nation came together to develop strategies that can keep large crowds safe during an active shooter incident.
Folsom Field at CU Boulder played host to police snipers from Colorado, Las Vegas and Washington D.C. who conducted a three-day, live ammo crisis response training event over three days in November 2018. This exercise has become one of many similar exercises conducted recently with law enforcement snipers training realistic settings like football stadiums for their training exercises.
Snipers are among the elite of gun enthusiasts; trained to deliver precise shots at targets up to two miles away. You might see these characters featured in Hollywood flicks performing incredible feats like shooting down Taliban fighters from 2,500 yards. But being a professional sniper is more than just cool; it requires extensive training, practice, and luck before becoming effective at it.
Experienced military or law enforcement sniper units may know that life as a sniper can be challenging. While movies typically depict them as one-person force chasing down targets, reality is usually much more complex. Mark Lang, director of Tacflow Academy’s Sniper Training program spoke to 9News about what it really takes to become a police sniper.
Sniper training can be intense and requires developing the necessary precision shots at varying distances and conditions in all types of targets – the goal being achieving 100% hit rates regardless of location or orientation of targets. Lang notes that high-ranking officers typically spend upwards of one year learning the fundamentals of this job at sniper schools.
Once you become a police sniper, your career continues to develop as you undertake increasingly complex missions. These might include protecting public venues and responding to critical incidents that might arise at sporting events or other public gatherings – so you might find snipers at major public spectacles such as Super Bowl events.
Images posted online after last year’s Super Bowl brought this practice into focus, though it is far from novel. According to Jerry Jones of Dallas Cowboys fame, who revealed this knowledge during an interview with CNN, his stadium was deliberately designed with multiple sniper perches from its construction on.