"The agent who shot 40-year-old Agent Arias accidentally switched his training gun for his loaded duty weapon prior to the exercise, the Miami Herald reported.
His duty weapon held live ammunition and Agent Arias was shot twice in the chest."
How the hell does this happen? How can a LEO in a training class make such a critical mistake? Or be allowed to make such a mistake in a training class? Direct access to his loaded duty weapon in a training scenario?
I am a certified live fire shoothouse Instructor and range master. One of the major tenets of live shoothouse is to have a sterile area boundary and a clear delineation of clean and dirty. Unfortunately, not all groups use this or some dangerous hybrid of it and trust on their buddies to respect it and properly clear their guns. One of the most dangerous times is post lunch break. There are a lot of documented range shootings that have been post lunch where cops or students have gone to lunch with their hot guns and come back and didnt swap back to training guns.
I ran a Sims shoothouse for over a dozen LA SWAT teams during a training evolution and when me and the other Instructor set up the boundaries from dirty to clean the very FIRST SWAT cop I patted down for ammo or mags (We had dedicated blue Sims gun on a table near the house) he had two mags of live ammo in his pouch. After loudly calling him out to the line of 50-60 SWAT cops they all saw the danger of overconfidence and started checking each other before they even got to the boundary.
I helped out with a SWAT Team a couple months ago for their school shooter training. Spent the better part of the day with. If I’m not mistaken their duty weapons were left in their vehicles & dedicated training weapons were used. Regardless it was a tragedy that this happened.