James Burton

We recently reached out to Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical to discuss how his training company started, common misconceptions about SWAT, the transition he saw with the MP5 to the AR-15, and some of his current favorite ARs. Bill Blowers' background, via his website: Bill Blowers has decades of training, teaching and using modern service weapons on SWAT operations. He served in the US Army for 6 years and was a Police Officer for 26 years. Bill spent the bulk of his LE career assigned to SWAT holding positions as a Sniper, Ballistic Shield Man, Mechanical/Ballistic Breacher, Assistant Team Leader and Team Leader on a large and busy regional SWAT team. He has planned or participated in approximately 1,500 missions, he has over 5,000 hours of documented training time, and holds instructor certifications in a variety of SWAT related topics. Q: Bill, can we start with a bit of your early background and how you began your career in law enforcement…and how that led to what you do now at Tap-Rack Tactical? Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical: The very early start was me joining the Army. I went in for about six years. I joined up as a scout. That was my early exposure to the M-16/AR family of guns…as well as tactics, and just that whole world of using guns in a professional capacity. But from the time I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to be a copper. So I reenlisted from Germany to come to Fort Lewis in Washington…I did this because I’m from Washington state. I ended up spending a few years there at Fort Lewis. As time went on, I decided to punch out and I began looking for cop jobs in the region. Bill Blowers graduating from the academy... I got lucky and got hired by a small police department here in the area. There, I worked 18 months and then decided I wanted to move on to a bigger department. I then went to a police department that had a SWAT team, K-9, a bunch of stuff that little agency did not. Army Experience Pays Off Now, when I was an NCO in the Army, I had the opportunity to run some rifle ranges. This is because as you get rank, you’re training younger soldiers how to do stuff. And that idea of training others really interested me. I had also been really passionate about shooting since I was a little kid. So, when the police department I worked for created a position for range staff, I eagerly submitted for that. Thankfully, I ended up getting lucky and getting that position. Then about a year later, I got lucky again and I was able to get on the SWAT team. I was able to then go through the rest of my career assigned to SWAT...doing the firearms-based stuff that I love. Teaching Yourself and Others As it happened, the longer I was on SWAT, the more I got to train others. I have always really enjoyed that aspect of the job…trying to show others how to do things. Another thing I enjoy is that as a teacher, if I am going to teach a topic, I have to research the topic and become either really good at it myself or become really knowledgeable at it. I’ve taken that seriously, and I tried to improve my own game a lot teaching for the agency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-I0yEwmu1Y Bill Blowers in a Surefire tutorial on night vision... The Beginnings of Tap-Rack Tactical Somewhere around 2000-2001, I began teaching at the basic squad school for the state of Washington, where they run their own SWAT school out of the police academy. I did that for about eight years. During this time, a friend of mine who was also teaching there and myself started a company together. We did that for about three years, but we eventually split up…It was amicable. It wasn’t any kind of big breakup or anything, he just had different things he wanted to get done and I wanted to work on the training side a lot more than we were doing. Tap-Rack Goes Full Time We split the business up and then I started Tap-Rack Tactical in 2006, primarily doing SWAT-type courses for cops only around the pacific northwest region. Then I decided last year to retire. I retired last February. I’ve been retired for a year now from police work after 26 years. Since then, I’ve opened up some courses to good citizens…firearms courses in particular. And I’ve been doing that for the past year. I’ve been going around the country, meeting some good folks, meeting some good armed citizens, as well as still working with coppers. Q: As far as your basic SWAT class that you offer, can you go over who that’s geared for? Is it for officers who are looking to get on a SWAT team and want to prepare? Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical: Most of the guys coming through my basic SWAT class are already assigned to a team. They’ve gone through whatever the selection process is for their agency or that team. They’ve been selected, they’ve been on a few months, and now that team is looking to get them through that basic level of training. Occasionally, I’ll get guys who are not on a team yet. They’re attending with the hope the class will help them build their resume and give them a better shot at being selected. Q: When people hear the term “SWAT” I think it generates a lot of ideas in their heads. Are there misconceptions out there about SWAT you can help clear up? Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical: There’s misconceptions about dang near every job that’s out there. I think on the SWAT side of the house, it’s that we’re just “knuckle draggers” and “pawns for the man” and all of that kind of crap. I would tell you that, in my experience, the guys that are the most protective of the 2nd amendment and the Constitution are SWAT guys. Along with that, within my experience, there have been plenty of times where things that we were being tasked to do didn’t quite "smell right." It was the guys on the team itself that went to the boss, and said “this doesn’t feel like something we should be doing” or “we need to solve it in a different manner.” I tend to think SWAT guys are some of the more reasonable guys out there…versus the automatons that a lot of times they are portrayed as on TV and movies. Q: Being involved with SWAT for so long, can you talk about some of the changes you’ve seen over the years? Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical: The biggest change since I came on SWAT in 1995 is the gear - the weapons themselves, the optics, and some of the supporting equipment that makes everybody safer. A basic example of that would be the first long weapon I was assigned on a SWAT team was an MP5 with iron sights and no other supporting equipment. Over time, I ended up finding flashlights to put on it. Then, we transitioned to red dot sights on those guns. Then we got rid of those submachine guns altogether and we went to the AR platform around 1997-1998. As both an organization and as a SWAT team, we also got rid of the shotguns very early compared to some others. Ensuring the Tool Does Not Become the Tactic Now, other gear like pole cameras, robotics, drones and a variety of other things that teams are starting to use…those types of technology pieces require training of their own. Teams have to learn how to operate and keep them running. But just as important, they must also learn how to incorporate them into their tactics so that the tool does not become the tactic. Sometimes teams will get the equipment and they rely so heavily on it that they change how they are conducting business. But if the equipment goes down, or it gets stuck…sometimes they flounder. There has to be a balance with that stuff. What Goes Around... But as far as straight tactics, techniques and procedures – internal and external…really not much has changed. Because there’s only so many ways you can go through a door, right? Not much has changed in that regard. The same things that were being done in 1995 are kind of the same thing being done today. https://youtu.be/gJbqwRY6NOA Bill Blowers discusses muzzle orientation and where he points weapons during searches and room clearing. Highly recommended video... Everything seems to be cyclical in the tactics game. I’ll see something pop up as this "new thing"…someone will say “this is the Bill Blowers Technique.” And I’ll go “man, that is not the Bill Blowers Technique, that technique is from the late 90s, and it was called something else. All you’ve done is rebranded it and changed something slightly, but it is essentially the same dang thing going on inside the building.” Loss of Institutional Knowledge I wonder why that is sometimes. Perhaps it’s just the nature of humans…new guys coming on and old guys like me transitioning out. It seems we lose that institutional knowledge and experience over time. As such, the “new thing” is “new” only because there is no depth left on the team to say “No, we have already tried that and we found it lacking.” Q: Can you go into more detail about why your team and many others seemed to do away from the MP5 and towards the AR platform? Bill Blowers of Tap-Rack Tactical: We were very early adopters of short barreled ARs for our team…getting rid of our submachine guns and going to the 5.56 cartridge. There were a few reasons why we did that that. The biggest reason is it was overall much safer for the public if we ended up missing. By now, it’s been very well documented and demonstrated that if you start shooting through sheetrock or common construction materials in America, the 5.56 round is stopped a whole heck of a lot faster than 9mm rounds are. 9mm will go through, in some cases, double and triple the amount of sheetrock that a 5.56 round will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKlcqwtFdmE Bill Blowers on the MP5 “Sooner Rather Than Later” One of the things that’s distasteful about the job is the fact that sometimes police officers are forced to take human lives. So, if we are forced to shoot someone in the line of duty, there’s probably a reason for it, meaning that we're trying to prevent them or stop them right now from continuing to hurt someone, or hurt one of...