Does anybody have an idea why the Customs goons plan on using 90 million rounds of .40 ammo per year? That's what they seem to be buying: 450 million rounds on a five year contract.
ICE has 20,500 employees. Not all of them are gun-toters, figure that maybe half of them are sworn cops, so ten thousand guys are going to each shoot 45,000 rounds a year? That's just under a thousand a week, which might be understandable if they were all professional competitors in pistol shooting. And why are they then not using somewhat cheaper range ammo for target practice, rather than higher-cost hollowpoints?
Anyway, look at what DBP's Office of Homeland Security Investigations does: They supposedly investigate matters that threaten national security, including art theft, copyright violations, illegal parking, and child pornography.* If you know of a rational explanation of how any of those things have a bearing on the national security of the United States, I'd very much like to know.
Note that one of the areas that HSI claims as being in their wheelhouse is "human rights violations". Oh, I really trust them to do that, since they are obviously doing a pretty good Helen Keller imitation in that they have closed their eyes and ears to the human rights violations done in our name. When HSI drags George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, Jay Bybee, David Addington and John Yoo away in handcuffs, drop me a line. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
This comment is spot on, by the way.
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* I added one. See if you can find it.
Cat Pawtector!
3 hours ago
8 comments:
Sounds like someone bought some stock in an arms manufacturer.
That's also Secret Service, BP, and FLETC...
So even with 20,000 cops, that's still 500 rounds per cop per week. How many cops are going to go to the range and shoot ten boxes of cartridges a week?
Most of it will likely be burned up at FLETC, where they provide ammo to visiting agencies, which is... pretty much every agency in the US.
Seriously, the internet has blown this way out of proportion in nearly every way imaginable (for instance the contract is not for "450 million rounds" it's for "up to 450 million rounds at X price in X time period".)
Also, I'm pretty sure that the human rights violations going on right now are being committed under a different C-in-C.
I'd say that much of that ammo is either going to a few peoples home and or else sold on the black market. That is the way that government works. My Dad was offered a "case" of .45 ACP when he mustered out of WW2.
w3ski
Scanned comments. "natty" stood out. Am I right?
Read the article again. It is for a "maximum" of 450 million rounds over the course of a 5 year contract. That doesn't mean that they're obligated to buy 450 million rounds, or that they'll buy 450 million rounds, it simply means that the defense contractor is obligated to maintain the capacity to deliver that many rounds if the DHS wanted them.
Regarding .40 S&W, as Tam mentioned above, it's what they'll train on at FLETC. If the DHS was intending to impose martial law, they're not going to do it with a sidearm round, you'd see a massive buy of .223.
This reminds me of the freakout over the offer of spare MRAP rolling frames by a defense contractor to other Federal agencies, which included a neato-keen photoshop of a DHS armored car that, err, was a photoshop. I parsed the actual procurement data on that -- i.e., the frames became available at the beginning of the month, there were no procurements before that, so any shiny new DHS MRAP is a photoshop, as you can verify if you look at the photoshopped vehicle and note that the American flag on the front is *backwards* because this supposed photo was flipped as part of composing it in Photoshop. It was quite easy to verify that, uhm, yeah, there's a couple thousand spare rolling frames being offered real cheap, and no, there hasn't been enough time for any of them to get rebodied yet and they're as likely to be rebodied as flatbed trucks (what they started out as to begin with) as armored trucks.
It's wise to keep an eye on Preznit Hopey Changey, he's proven that the only Change from the Bush administration when it comes to human rights is Hope-washing, but these freakouts are a distraction from the real threats like the new patent law that basically says the first big corporation with the money to file a patent on an idea owns the idea, even if the idea has been in the public domain for decades but nobody bothered filing a patent on it in that time. So you're running a small business selling something, a big business can come in and patent what you're selling and charge YOU for the privilege of selling YOUR OWN invention. That's fscked. But that's the kind of sellout Hopey Changey is. Funny that you don't hear anything about "first to file" replacing "first to invent" in the new copyright law, hrm?
- Badtux the Patented Penguin
As Badtux says, it's a maximum of 450 million rounds, over five years. That's 90 million a year, by my calculation, or 9,000 rounds per agent/officer. Still a lot of trigger pulling if they make maximum use of that option, methinks. Hope they have a good plan for repetitive stress disorder.
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