SAUGUS – With his weapon drawn, Lt. Ronald Witten sharply stares down his target – a menacing-looking man standing a few feet away from him, and quickly fires off a spray off bullets, stopping him in his tracks.The target, a paper silhouette hanging in the Saugus Police Department?s basement shooting range, flaps in the air as a cloud of copper dust falls to the ground from the environmentally safe bullets.?Officers are taught to shoot to wound and to shoot to stop, but not to shoot to kill,” he said. “And it would be a first to see someone shoot the gun out of someone?s hand. That only happens in Hollywood.”Witten, who is the Training Coordinator and Senior Firearms Instructor, has been with the department since 1977. Since then, he has trained countless officers on the skills needed to shoot a firearm and stay safe in the line of fire.However, the small, but essential range he uses on a daily basis was almost nixed from the layout of the department?s building when it was constructed in 1999. Witten said the plan was originally to have a range on the roof of the building, similar to what the Lynn Police have, but when money fell short, the building was built without a range.As a result, Witten said officers did their training at Fort Devens, the Andover Sportsmen?s Club and several other locations from 1999 to 2003, but that proved to be costly. During those years, an estimated $110,000 to $120,000 was spent to train the roughly 50 officers twice a year.Frustrated by the costs, Witten said he pushed for the in-house, 45-foot range to be built and eventually won the battle.?If an officer happens to get into a shooting, the family (of the injured) is going to get an attorney and they?re going to look at training,” Witten said. “In 1976, Saugus had to pay $1 million because of a shooting that paralyzed a kid and (the family) won the case on failure to train.”Once the range was built, Assistant Police Chief Leonard Campanello said the cost associated with qualifying the officers dropped from about $29,000 to about $7,000 a year, bringing a savings with it of about $22,000 a year, or nearly $170,000 over the past eight years.The range cost approximately $350,000 to construct, which Campanello said is expected to recoup that cost after 16 years of operation. While still functional, the range is starting to show some wear-and-tear from the thousands of rounds of ammunition put through it year-after-year but, as of now, Campanello said there is no funding in place, nor an estimate available as to how much it would cost to make repairs to the space.?We can use it 24 hours a day and we don?t have to travel,” Witten said. “We?ve saved a lot of money.”Under low-lighting, pitch black conditions or simulated daylight, Witten said the officers have and continue to be trained in how to handle every situation. But there?s always the unpredictable situation.?We teach the officers to keep their distance and never get close unless there is backup,” he said. “After all, everyone knows who we are, but we don?t know who the bad guys are.”