Limited training time, limited budgets, limited space in vehicles, conditions change w/o warning. One 20-300 yd gun is good. Big events get familiarization with venues and sometimes live fire at large areas like airports, NASCAR tracks, etc.
Intermediate barriers are quite common. Vehicles, commercial and residential buildings, etc. Very common. For the relatively few shootings, lots of those.
308 is very very very common in military, paramilitary and police use, so bullets and cartridges are loaded for all sorts of specialist purposes. It is easy to get good performing (for whatever parameters you want!) 308 cartridges. Handloads are nearly unheard of; it must be factory ammo.
Guns, training, and support systems persist for a long time. Very few agencies are going to change their mind every decade or less to change to the caliber of the week.
Many teams use semi-auto guns as followups are more important than precision. The precision is relative. What many on this forum consider accurate is miles ahead of what is needed by police marksmen. Reliability is unquestioned though so anything that is fussy at all is no-go.
There is no need for the guns to be especially light, small, or to support subsonic projectiles.
The ability to engage rapidly, with precision, at arbitrarily long ranges is a deterrent. Think how often countersnipers are visible on rooftops. They are not bad at hiding, and their lack of engaging at long range means it is working.
There is a report available for those with professional creds. Here's a summary:
To date, we have collected reports of over 500 police sniper shootings that occurred between 1984 and 2022. Some highlights:
- Not surprisingly, the .308 was the most common caliber firearm used by snipers. Others employed have included .223, .30-06, .300 WM and .338.
- Contrary to common belief, fewer than half of the persons shot were struck in the head. Most suspects were hit in the body or extremities.
- Much traditional sniper training has been limited to prone, bipod 100-yard shooting drills. The report verifies that sniper shootings may be done from a variety of distances and are seldom from a prone bipod position. In fact, documentation shows nearly half of snipers have had to utilize standing, sitting, kneeling, squatting, or improvised positions. Hopefully, this knowledge will inspire teams to incorporate position shooting into their training programs. It certainly removes the most common excuses to avoid doing so.
- Nearly 98% of recorded police sniper shootings took place at distances less than 200 yards. This is contrary to the belief that snipers in rural areas deploy and shoot at long ranges.
- Night-vision equipment has played only a limited role in actual shootings to date. However, there is a demonstrated need for teams to purchase and train with night vision. Nearly 45% of the shootings documented occurred during low-light hours.
- We have documented dozens of instances where two or more snipers fired simultaneous shots at a single suspect. However, none of the reports received recorded sniper engagements on multiple suspects.
