UMM, I have been in the military for the last 10 years or so, i am infantry, an army sniper, Navy EOD I have been to a half dozen diffrent shooting schools and have been in every armed conflict/peace keeping mission since somalia and that broad general comment about the military being trigger happy was completely outta line & highly offensive. :x
EOD1, THANK YOU for what you do, we are deeply indebted to you (and all our troops) for your sacrifices on our behalf!
As for FA/burst/SA for patrol rifles for "general purpose" LEOs (not those in specialty units), I want to add my 2-cents. Also, I'm only going to address this relevant to the more "urbanized" areas of MA (Eastern MA, cities and suburbs) where the population density should contribute to any firepower decisions and differs greatly from vast unpopulated areas such as can be found in some areas of the Berkshires (as one example).
In Eastern MA, the chiefs that I know are all bureaucrats operating in a hugely anti-gun (and anti-gun includes doing the "minimum to get by" for training officers in firearms use) environment, with very limited $ resources earmarked for firearms training, and very few places where officers can actually do any tactical firearms training (all the PDs that I know beg local gun clubs to use their ranges for FREE for their limited training). Most gun clubs are also in built-up areas where a stray round can shut them down in a heartbeat (e.g. which happened in the Reading area a number of years ago).
I hope everyone agrees that to properly control FA/burst requires a lot of good tactical training, something that is extremely rare in Eastern MA. In this area most PDs only do training 1-2x/year and due to limited budgets they can't just hand out ammo for the officers to train adequately.
I assisted our PD in swapping 3 smgs for 7 M4s. Internally an instructor and a young officer (who used to be a firearms mfr rep prior to going FT PO) convinced the brass to go SA instead of FA/burst. Shortly after they got them, the instructor who was the best AR15 advocate gets activated and has an "all expense paid trip" to Iraq! The training officer left with the task of training/deploying the M4s is NOT a believer in patrol rifles but a "shotgun guy". The officers are given VERY MINIMAL training with the M4s (according to one officer the training was no more than 2-3 hours) before they are deployed in the cruisers. Talking with a number of the officers, they told me this and a few commented that since they were former military "it all came back to them" . . . .but many never served in the military and it was the first high-power rifle experience for them.
My friend (PO) returned from Iraq and invited me to join him at the local gun club as he was qualifying the officers. What shocked me was that he told me that it had been 17 months since any of the officers had fired the M4s!
Given these type of circumstances, I believe that SA patrol rifles are definitely a better strategic move than deploying FA/burst. Adequate training (in my mind) would be at least monthly and if that were ever to be a real option then perhaps FA/burst might be viable for patrol rifles . . . .but I never see that happening here in Eastern MA!