Cody Snider did not come from the firearms industry. He never carried a badge or wore a uniform. What he brought to law enforcement training was an entrepreneur’s refusal to accept that the existing options were good enough.
Before UNIT Solutions existed, Snider and his father, Jay, were running a company that distributed airsoft guns for recreation. Police agencies kept calling. They needed frequent simulated firearms training in realistic situations, but many lacked the budget for the rounds that kind of repetition requires. Officers were training far less than they wanted to, and the market had come to treat that shortfall as a fact of life.
For nearly three decades, firearms training systems fell into two camps: converted duty weapons and, more informally, airsoft rifles.
As Cody discovered, airsoft had a real place in simulation training, but it also had hard limits, and nobody had done the engineering work to move them.
“The airsoft business was getting inbound sales from law enforcement searching for airsoft guns for training. As we saw that, our entrepreneurial alarm bells went off,” said Cody Snider, copresident of UNIT Solutions. “It’s just that [airsoft’s] not built for that type of durable, realistic use you’d expect military and law enforcement to want.”
Snider came at the problem from outside the firearms world, with a family history of entrepreneurship behind him and no background in guns or policing. He carried no inherited assumptions about how a training weapon was supposed to work and no stake in defending a tradeoff the industry had lived with for years. Most of the market treated the choice as settled: high-fidelity training that happened rarely, or low-fidelity training that happened often. Snider saw a product nobody had bothered to develop.
That realization sparked a discovery process to understand how law enforcement and the military conduct weapons training. Snider spent more than a year observing a gamut of weapons training sessions and talking to military and law enforcement professionals about their likes, dislikes and needs. He was after the root cause of the challenges, not improving existing products.
What he found was a gap with a specific cause. No one had put focused engineering against the core challenges of a non-lethal environment. Conversion kits carried the constraints of live weapons because they were live weapons. Airsoft carried the limitations of a recreational product because that is what it was designed to be. Neither had been built from the ground up for professional training and officers were absorbing the difference every time they stepped onto a range.
“By the end of that year, we felt there was an opportunity for something else,” said Snider.
So Snider wrote the first product specification for the UNIT4 Rifle and started a company to build it. Every line in that spec traced to something an officer or an instructor had said they needed, not to an existing system that was already developed.
For the past 30 years, most law enforcement agencies have chosen conversion kits to adapt real firearms — often an officer’s own duty weapon — for non-lethal training munitions like blanks and marking and nonmarking rounds. Because they are using real firearms, conversion kits are prized for offering the most realistic training experience.
However, that realism comes at a cost.
The cost of realism
The cost of simulated ammunition can be even higher than duty ammo, which means agencies may be forced to limit purchases and cut back on rounds expended during training events. Or they may schedule training less frequently.
There are also safety concerns. While conversion kits, properly installed, make it virtually impossible to fire a live round, the non-lethal rounds still use primer and eject brass — and thus they should get the same level of discipline as live fire. The training scenarios should be realistic enough to be valuable, but controlled tightly enough that live ammunition, unsafe weapons handling and uncontrolled contact never enter the scenario.
“By using a real weapon and primer, you have to go through all the same red tape processes you have to go through with live fire,” said Snider. “In military parlance, they’d say, ‘We’ve got to go through the arms room process, the ammo supply point process and the range control process.’ So, there’s three distinct processes to get these systems drawn out, approved and used.
“The trade-off we found that customers were making is that with conversion kits and simunitions you get realistic training, but the frequency, the flexibility, the number of locations — all of that was significantly reduced from what officers actually want,” said Snider.
Fewer barriers with airsoft
To increase frequency of training through reduced costs and ease of use, many police departments train with airsoft systems.
Because airsoft systems are classified as non-firearms and use pressurized air instead of primer to propel the training munition, they are not controlled the same as firearms. This means training with airsoft is free from some of the protocols needed when using conversion kits with real weapons.
“From a safety perspective, those [red tape] issues are reduced massively,” said Snider. “It can’t chamber a live round. It’s not as dangerous upon impact in terms of injury. You need less protective equipment.”
On the upside, the lower cost and reduced barriers to use offer more frequent training opportunities to officers. But airsoft weapons and magazines do not have the same weight, feel or durability as real firearms, which can lead to subtle differences in training like putting a spent magazine back into the plate carrier for concern of breaking it instead of dropping it as one would in a real gunfire exchange.
“The benefit of airsoft is that you’re going to train more, but you’re training more on something that’s building bad habits,” said Snider.
“So, our question was, ‘How do you cross the threshold so you give [officers] the realism and durability they get out of their current systems, but in a way that offers more training opportunities?’”
For 30 years, agencies were asked to pick a side. Conversion kits bought realism and paid for it in frequency. Airsoft bought frequency and paid for it in realism. Snider refused the premise. Rather than iterating toward a slightly better airsoft gun, the team went back to first principles and engineered a system purpose-built for the job.
| Conversion kits | UNIT Solutions (purpose-built) | Airsoft |
| High realism High cost Fewer trainings Marking and nonmarking rounds | High realism Low cost More trainings Marking and nonmarking rounds Engineered as a complete system | Low realism Low cost More trainings Nonmarking rounds only |
Engineering from the problem up
UNIT Solutions set out to give officers the realism and durability of a duty weapon along with the freedom from red tape, the safety margin and the cost per shot of a pneumatic system. Getting there required engineering, not adaptation.
“Fundamentally, these are live weapons that have been retrofit to shoot pneumatically and make sure they can’t chamber a live round. To get those, it really was about two things,” said Snider. “One is we built a standalone weapon. And, two, we got that classified by the ATF as a non-firearm.”
UNIT Solutions’ first manufacturing partner was Lewis Machine & Tool, and the training rifle was made with real firearm components and materials, but with modifications that prevented it from being able to chamber a live round.
“We started with a real weapon and worked backwards to get it to work pneumatically,” said Snider.
Beginning with the UNIT4 Rifle, the core team settled on a product development standard it has held to since: a product ships only when a professional can train on it safely, realistically and often enough for the reps to matter.
Development took 3½ years. Shortcuts were available that would have put the UNIT training rifle in front of buyers far sooner, but the team did not take them.
“It was a beast to get to this spec and very hard to get to this level of durability, but we had a spec and we stuck to it,” said Snider. “We really wanted it to be as close to using your live weapon as humanly possible. And I feel that’s what we’ve achieved.”
The UNIT4 rifle sets the standard for product quality and every product in the ecosystem is designed to match it. A training weapon that outperforms its magazine or its munition still leaves the officer compromising, and so the weapon, the magazines, the training rounds and the customer support around them were engineered as one system. The UNIT9 training pistol is cut from the same fabric.
What comes next is held to the same bar. A UNIT9 Laser Barrel is now in development, and will let an officer run the pistol with full slide action and live recoil while engaging laser based targetry, pairing the feel of a duty weapon with instrumented feedback on where the round went. The product will enhance what’s possible when training without projectiles in locations like hospitals, courthouses, airports and other sensitive locations.
UNIT Solutions’ products and the mission of the company were built on one fundamental premise. More frequent repetitions with realistic equipment will produce first responders who are better prepared when it counts and communities that are better protected because of it.
“We’ve given customers a way to not have to sacrifice on realism and durability,” said Snider, “but really increase their training reps, the frequency, the flexibility and give them that ‘best of both worlds’ combination they were looking for.”
For more information, visit UNIT Solutions.
