First of all let me say, this is old news and has been filling the blogosphere and been on forums everywhere in the US for some time now.
"Millions of rounds of high powered ammo": a quote from one of those articles. It sounds like a statement made by the Brady bunch. It is .40 caliber pistol ammo, for heavens sake.
DHS is one of the largest Federal law enforcement agencies. They control departments like ICE, TSA and a whole bunch of other large alphabet soup agencies. These agencies employ thousands of agents. They are all required to qualify regularly. If you can do the math, dividing the number of agents by the number of rounds ordered, it isn't very much. Not only that but the contract is spread out over five years. Do the math. Divide the number of rounds by five and try to figure out how many agents this will be distributed to. A quote from Wikipedia:
With more than 200,000 employees, DHS is the third largest Cabinet department, after the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.[4] Homeland security policy is coordinated at the White House by the Homeland Security Council.
The social security administration issue:
Amid all the outrage from certain bloggers and tinfoil hattery, all I can find is
THIS. It is a request for a bid for 174,000 rounds of .357 SIG. Keep in mind that almost every city and town has a SSA office. Each office has armed guards. Each armed guard has to qualify periodically. SSA also has Investigative officers who often have to go to the inner cites to investigate SS fraud. They have to qualify periodically too. Looking at it that way, it is not such a large amount.
The NOAA's National weather service order is for agents of the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement. Do you realize how much coastline the US has? Do you realize how many personnel it takes to patrol all that and enforce the laws? The NOAA order was for 46,000 rounds and 500 paper targets. If we assume target practice and do the math, it's a mere 92 rounds per target. I sometimes shoot more than that in a weekend.
A quote from one article:
The federal government is clearly gearing up for the likelihood of civil unrest on a scale that could outstrip what we’ve already seen in countries across Europe.
All I've got to say is that civilians in the US purchase ammo in quantities that are levels of magnitude higher than any federal agency. So taking the above reporters line of reasoning, are we to deduce that civilians in the US are clearly preparing for a massive insurrection against the government? What utter rot!
Some of you may have read
my Appleseed post. In the first class we did there were about 20 people and we shot off about 600 rounds each. That was 12,000 rounds shot off by a small group of people during the course of one weekend. In my second class there were 11 people and we shot close to 500 rounds each. That is 5500 rounds. So over just fourdays, an event that I participated in shot off over 17500 rounds of ammunition. Do you see an insurrection in the making? You would be very foolish, no let me rephrase that; you would be downright stupid to believe that.
If you remember a post sometime back that was about ammunition made by CCI. It noted that just one plant alone made 4 million rounds per day. They have been doing that for years and it is all sold to civilians. Where did that insurrection go?
