WASHINGTON — Following a series of incidents in which multiple agents shot at one another while the actual suspect escaped unharmed, the Secret Service announced that it has officially replaced all traditional silhouette targets at its training facilities with high-resolution photographs of fellow Secret Service agents in the hopes of improving accuracy.
The move comes after internal data revealed that while agents routinely miss armed suspects at point-blank range, their accuracy climbs to a staggering 98% the moment a colleague accidentally steps into the line of fire.
“For years, we’ve wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to train our men and women to hit fleeing suspects,” said Secret Service Director Sean Curran, standing in front of a firing range where a trainee had just successfully hit a cardboard cutout of a fellow agent. “We looked at the footage from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and realized our agents don’t have a marksmanship problem, rather they have a targeting problem. Our guys can empty a fifteen-round magazine at an assassin and not hit anything. But the second a fellow agent enters the frame? Dead center. Every time.”
Under the new guidelines, trainees are no longer told to “neutralize the threat.” Instead, they are instructed to aim for the guy they went to the Academy with, a shift that has reportedly seen qualifying scores skyrocket.
At press time, the Secret Service was reportedly considering a secondary training phase where they replace the President with a cardboard cutout of a notorious assassin, in the hopes that agents might finally stop standing in front of him.
