Upsetting Day: Shotgun or Sidearm? 🌭

You’d assume something as important as a police training film would be a dry and official production… but you’d also assume something as important as police weapons training wouldn’t be done via filmstrip like they’re an unruly fourth grade class on the schooldays Mrs. Davis is getting too divorced to deal with kids.

You would be wrong on both accounts.

Back in the 1970s if cops got any training at all it was in the form of short snuff films called things like...

SoS was filmed with the full cooperation of the Pasadena Police Department, who let six robbers, two perverts, and one murderer take a free day while they did fantasy roleplay for a short film designed to be played to an audience of one in a darkened break room. It’s probably not the biggest deal. The Pasadena Police Department is mostly a mall-cop training program. They’re the department you’re reassigned to if you get mugged while on duty. Their official jurisdiction is the drive-thru line at In-N-Out burger and nobody transfers out of the PPD because your work experience is like for-profit college credits. It’s hilarious that you got duped this way but that does not obligate anybody to recognize your shoddy training. Just like a University of Phoenix diploma, the most valuable part of a PPD badge is the Denny’s coupon printed on the back.

Pasadena does have some interesting ideas about policework, though -- the film opens on a silent alarm going off, and dispatch gets the report like this:

Fucking tiny conveyor belt for envelopes! That is so much fun, this is like a Dave & Buster’s police station. I hope it doesn’t just take quarters because I converted all my cash at the token machine by the gun dispenser.

That dispatcher gets her Willy Wonka crime report and hops on the radio. She tells the responding officer he’s looking for a suspect described as a male negro, 6’2”, 180 lbs.

And look at this black son of a bitch:

I’m not sure what happened there. Maybe it was a lack of attention to detail, or maybe they’d already recorded the voiceover when SoS realized that it didn’t set a great precedent to show a white cop just fucking annihilating a black dude with a shotgun ten seconds into a training video, so they recast the part. I’m going to assume it’s the former because I’ve met cops.

Seriously, Officer Mitch Manwell here arrives on scene and immediately obliterates half a city block:

Look, I know this was pre-video games, back before every toddler had an innate knowledge of pellet spread. But had Officer DeFault never even heard of shotguns before? Did he just not give a shit about collateral damage? Or wait, was he aiming for the black guy in the foreground and tragically shot an entire Kohl’s Clearance Sale worth of white people by accident?

To understand what happened here -- to really explore the space of this massacre -- we go into a full biography of every innocent bystander hit:

This is Steven Goldberg, 42, truck driver:

Life rode him hard and put him away dry. He’s been driving convertible trucks using only his face every day since he was six, and every single trip was through the Mojave. I know the ‘70s were a rough decade where men aged in dog years, but that’s supposed to be just five years difference between him and Rosemary Fenner, 37, secretary:

Who looks like she just found out she has an accidental shotgun wound fetish. And that’s a damn shame because the Pellet Party chatroom won’t open for another twenty years. She’ll have nobody to share her kink with. Luckily she’s just feet away from Katherine Bokar, 29, part time teacher...

Full time blasthead. These women were supposed to give us ‘confusion and terror’ and yet both wound up giving us ‘the millisecond after Idris Elba exploded.’

But by far the heaviest shot is of the baby.

Who is not listed among the wounded, but by the way the camera lingers and the music drops out so all we can hear is crying, you know this is the worst consequence: A surprised baby. So a dried apple of a man lost his arm to gunfire instead of skin cancer. So a couple of newly minted dangersluts found themselves and maybe, just maybe...each other. So what. The real danger of wild shotgun blasts is that they make white babies cry.

With those stakes established let’s meet our host, Sgt. Bill “With Pay” Blastcock, a man with 144 confirmed punk kills:

Every single time he mentions any kind of gun he hoists it up like he’s in a prop comedy workshop and you just asked him to show you ‘overcoming impotence’ using only objects. He informs us that “3 innocent civilians were wounded by a good, conscientious police officer…”

“And he didn’t even get the black guy,” is left implied.

Bill is way too sympathetic with panicky idiot cops who open fire on shopping malls. He explains Officer Manwell’s actions like this: “When a suspect shoots at you, you shoot back by instinct with any weapon you’ve got.”

This idea is repeated several times -- that police officers have no weapons or combat training whatsoever and that it is frankly unreasonable to expect them to act like they do. The reason we don’t give cops grenade launchers is because it’s only natural that they’ll use it to blow up an orphanage the first time a car backfires. That’s just instinct. It’s part of the natural world. It’s like a bear eating a poodle. Beautiful, in its way.

“Most cops get a lot of practice with their sidearm, but they don’t fire the shotgun very often, and they don’t know what happens after they pull the trigger,” Sgt. Blastcock says, without laughing.

They have no idea what happens after they pull the trigger on a shotgun, and yet we put one in their car anyway? Is this a plausible deniability situation? Laying the groundwork so cops can blow away a whole birthday party and say with a straight face they thought it fired confetti?

“For example,” Bill continues, “not one officer in ten has a clear idea of how bullets ricochet.”

What!

“Not one cop in a hundred knows how bullets work! 4 out of 5 police officers think there’s a little gremlin inside the handle that throws them really hard. Don’t try to correct them -- they believe it angers the gremlin and no court in the country would find them guilty of gunning down a pinko question-asker. Not guilty by way of Revolver Gremlin, they’ll say.”

That cannot be true, Bill. And somehow it gets worse: He goes on to say that almost every police officer thinks you can ricochet bullets like billiard balls...

I knew the ‘70s were dangerous, but I did not know every beat cop was in Wanted, trying to call bank shots on fleeing muggers.

Blastcock explains that, “Many cops grab the shotgun because it gives them a feeling of greater security - it’s a lot more powerful than a sidearm, you’ve got more bullets going for ya instead of just one, and a shotgun doesn’t have to be aimed carefully.”

He says it like he’s going to explain why that’s wrongheaded thinking, but that’s the end of the statement. He rebukes none of those claims.

In fact, the only problem with pulling a shotgun on every single criminal you see is just that it’s unwieldy, and you might not be able to hamburgify a shoplifter if there’s a baby nearby. Then you’re stuck carrying a stick that don’t even dead real good. Most of the rest of the film deals with the minor inconveniences that might befall you because you’re not allowed to put down the shotgun.

Bill spins up a hypothetical where an unarmed man is resisting arrest and the police naturally want to kill him for being annoying, but there are too many people around to use the shotgun. Plus their cop car is all the way across the parking lot, so now a good officer is stuck holding a useless weapon like he’s playing a game of Edward Shotgunhands.

“The guy with the shotgun can’t effectively help his buddy,” Bill says, worryingly casual now that we’re all accessories to the same abuses. “What can he do? Turn to the nearest little old lady and say ‘hey hold this for me will ya?’”

We are even shown the old lady:

I know you’re trying to drive your joke home with visuals, which is the hallmark of every great prop comic and I’m glad you took that workshop, but look at her expression -- I’m willing to lay odds that woman knows her way around a shotgun. Just ask the husband-shaped stain on the garage floor.

Let’s see another example of an awkward scenario that might prevent you from blindly murdering suspects with a shotgun.

This officer is called to a break-in but the, again, plainly unarmed robber sees him and runs away. So the cop gets out of his car like this:

He yells out “freeze” and the suspect immediately obeys, knowing that complying with an officer’s orders leaves only a 70% chance they’ll open fire:

Now Bill chimes in to explain that this looks like a great scenario -- you’ve got a bag of scumbag paint and a nice white wall for a canvas. But what’s this? Oh no! You might not be able to shoot that unarmed fleeing man in the back if, say, dipshit white children show up and ruin everything.

They skateboard in out of nowhere and stop suspiciously in the firing line to gawk. The robber knows the officer is the kind of asshole who brings a shotgun to a revolver party, so he turns to give the cop a shit-eating grin before jogging off and hopping a fence.

The officer follows, only to come up short because, that’s right, he’s not allowed to put the shotgun down to hop the fence. Then those idiot children come up to heckle him.

Bill seems to realize this is all harshing your blast buzz, so now that he’s explained all of the downsides of a shotgun like “can’t murder if babies are present; might be inconvenient to hold” it’s time to sing its praises.

“There are situations where the shotgun is the best possible weapon for a cop to have!” Blastcock says, noticeably brightening for the first time in this film. Actual quotes:

“The psychological effect of a heavier weapon can be a big advantage.”

You’ve always wanted to two-hand a cock that could kill somebody!

“You can point a shotgun instead of aiming it!”

Aiming, the worst part of having a gun!

“And at close range, you can blast the hell out of almost anything!”

We started this filmstrip with a formal and instructional tone. Maybe a little clumsy -- definitely PE teacher assigned to teach Sex Ed vibes -- but as the movie goes on we’re getting weirdly chummy about how great it is to blow the shit out of everything with shotguns. There is genuine laughter in Bill’s voice when he says, “You can just whirl, fire, and blow the guy away.”

That’s what this training film considers ideal usage: a police officer hearing a noise behind him and spinning around blindly blasting away, knowing full well there’s no collateral damage in a junkyard. What else could it be, but a criminal? A junkyard dog? Who cares? A junkyard worker? Papers ain’t gonna pick up that headline. Worse case scenario you’re talking about some kind of feral junkchild -- you’re practically doing it a favor, giving it a 12-gauge nap before battery poisoning does the same job over a longer time-frame.

To sum up, Sgt. Bill Blastcock drawls, “When it’s only the cop, his gun, and an armed suspect… it damn well better be the right gun.”

SHOTGUNS!

Damn well the right gun!