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Although many histories trace the police presence at Rodman’s Neck to the eve of World War II, Academy students had in fact been using the area for summer training a good 10 years earlier. Both the Army and the Navy have had their moments in the place — a fact underlined by the fiercely military look of the bungalows, marching lanes, and canteen areas spread around off the Long Island Sound inlet; if Bill Murray ever wants to make a sequel to Stripes, he could find worse locations.

As for the regular volleys of gunfire emanating from the ranges, that too have had an occasional national coloring when FBI agents rather than NYPD officers have used the premises for honing their weapons skills. If you can load it, shoot it, or unload it legally in the New York City area, the chances are good you have done it at Rodman’s Neck.

For all the stereophonic shooting, however, weapons qualification and re-qualification is only one part of the normal range activities. SWAT, OCCB, and riot control units appear regularly for drills. The command — formally known as the firearms & tactics section — might not commemorate Independence Day exactly on July 4, but you can be sure that a few days later it will host a fireworks display that would make the Grucci family envious — the detonation of the pounds and pounds of illegal fireworks seized from dealers. If less often, there are also the explosions of devices very much aimed at killing rather than celebrating. At one point or another over the years, for instance, explosives experts have blown up the handiwork left around the city by the Mad Bomber George Metesky, the Weathermen and Al-Qaeda terrorist cells.

Overseeing the operation are 112 instructors, all with lengthy street experience and all with an itch to pass on what they considered a life-saving education during their Academy days. As PBA delegate Lou Derespiris, a 13-year veteran, puts it, “This may be the only command in the city where everybody on the job requested being here.”

If Derespiris laments anything about the range these days, it’s the budgetary knife that has cut into Rodman’s Neck as much as everywhere else in the NYPD. “You only have to go back a few years to find 175 or 180 instructors. I don’t know what they think is gained by scaling back one of the most essential steps of police training, but that’s the way it is.”

On one tour we visited recently, different cops are taking different pops.

One class of about 20 ESU and Aviation officers is doing brush-up work on general security procedures. Another group twice that size troops through re-qualification, now moving from the range to Building 10 for the cleaning of weapons. Five instructors supervise the surrender of unused ammunition, examine each and every gun to be sure bullets haven’t been left in chambers, and line the cops behind standup tables for oiling their arms. Even though the students for the day have years of various kinds of service on the job, the mood is very much that of first-day school orientation. It’s not just the firearms that are being broken down and cleaned, it’s the focus on being a cop.

Everything is repeated by Steve Minguez and the other instructors twice when not three times. When one of the pupils is slow to follow instructions to point his presumably empty weapon toward the ceiling, Minguez gets a laugh by reminding him, “That’s the part of the building above your head.”

After the cops have serviced their (for the most part) Glocks and Smith & Wessons, they are marched back over to another range for a final loading drill. Along the way, Derespiris reflects on why the instructors themselves are armed as they move around the grounds. “The short of it is because we’re police officers,” he says. “The exceptions are in the classroom and on the firing line. We don’t carry there. You wear a gun in a classroom, you go back to the adage about accidents — it’s not if the gun’s going to go off someday, it’s when.”

The classroom exception brings to mind the infamous story of a DEA agent who was once invited to an elementary school to lecture children on the dangers of firearms. “The guy’s up there giving them the ABCs, how even agents like himself have to be careful when it comes to guns. To demonstrate the proper way to take his weapon from his holster, he pulls out his gun and shoots himself in the foot! I’d say he lost his audience right then and there. Half of them were probably scrambling under their desks and the other half were probably howling.”

If it’s been manufactured over the last 70 or 80 years, not only in the United States but also other parts of the world, the odds are pretty high that the range gunroom will have an example. Presiding over the collection is Robert Gasperi, who has something of the museum curator in him for his combination of arcane knowledge and sense of intimacy with each of the hundreds of different pieces.

Without hesitation, Gasperi will pull out the Thompson submachine gun used by the FBI and Prohibition-era gangsters (not to mention the Jimmy Cagneys of Hollywood); the German Army’s storm rifle that might have extended World War II disastrously if it had gone into mass production before 1944; Chinese AKs, Dutch X445s, and any number of Uzi models. Some of the weapons tell stories even without Gasperi’s footnotes — for example, one M10 with a barrel completely melted down from the heat of the Twin Towers fires.

Perhaps an even larger tale is in the fact that all the weapons have been confiscated by the NYPD over the years during criminal investigations. “You got an international black market out there that never sleeps,” observes Gasperi, “and sooner or later everything’s going to end up in the wrong hands in New York.”

John Painter is one of the armorers who make sure that what ends up in NYPD hands functions properly. An Academy graduate in 1989, Painter admits “my eyes lit up” the first time he set foot on the range for recruit training. “It just seemed like something that was right for me, and I never lost sight of it. Finally, in 1997, I asked for a transfer here and got it. I couldn’t be happier.”

What about a perception that those assigned to the range have it easier than the average cop on patrol?

Painter seems to have heard the question a thousand times before. “Am I going to say I don’t know what might be hiding in that building across the way there, just like a cop in a bad neighborhood? Of course not. And that alone is reason for nobody here ever to complain about anything. But more important is keeping it in mind that people are working out there, that we’re here for them, not just because of them. If I don’t do my job, they can’t do theirs, and you don’t want to think about the cost of that.”

On a technical level, Painter admits there is one gun in service “that drives me crazy,” but declines to specify the manufacturer. He also cites overburdened springs as a recurrent weapons problem. “But the variety is pretty wide,” he laughs. “That’s what makes every gun you break down a challenge. And you hate to say it but the overwhelming majority of the defects are caused, when not just abetted, by bad maintenance. People just don’t take care of their weapons the way they’ve been taught.”

Sometimes, though, it’s neither the weapon nor the police officer at fault. “A while back we had a bad problem with ammunition. The .38 ammo developed what we called a wedding band — an unwelded piece of casing that stuck out and caused misfires and everything else. It’s pretty rare for the ammo to be the bad guy, but once we alerted the maker, they fixed it.”

And what about the danger of getting too wrapped up in the mechanics of things? “Then you really don’t belong here,” Painter says readily. “People wear the guns, the guns don’t wear the people.”