DHS and Hollowpoints Explained

This has been done a few times here, addressing the initial 450 million rounds of JHP, then addressing it with Social Security’s investigators, and then debunking it again, but the story of DHS’s millions and billions of rounds keeps resurfacing.  And it’s good to ask questions, but some of them have answers that have already been given, and others are answers that just aren’t was widely known because they’re just a bit specific and technical.

From HotAir:

Why do they need to purchase huge stockpiles of ammunition? Far more, in fact, than the the Army buys on a per capita basis.

Homeland Security’s procurement officer is grilled in Congress on why federal agents who rarely fire weapons need several times more bullets annually than an Army officer. Who or what are they shooting at?

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Thursday asked Nick Nayak, DHS’ chief procurement officer, a question we and others have been asking: Why has the Department of Homeland Security been buying so much ammunition?

The military doesn’t actually shoot that much.  Military personnel walk around on base unarmed, and their issued weapons are locked up in armories, stored far from ammunition (hence why civilian security stopped Hasan at Ft. Hood).  There just isn’t that much shooting done – for example, rifle qualification in the Marine Corps has been an annual thing for years.  Infantry may fire more rifle or machinegun rounds, armor crews may fire more machinegun rounds, but admin and intel and logistics and motor T and the like will fire maybe once a year.

By contrast, federal law enforcement goes everywhere armed.  They even fly armed.  Pistol, rifle, and shotgun qualification for federal law enforcement is often a quarterly event.  They carry guns every day, everywhere, in contrast to the military, which carries when deployed or on assignment, and sometimes not even then.

Law enforcement often operates as individuals who encounter violent criminals who are an immediate, personal threat to their lives.  The military operates as a large group, and in such a manner that overwhelming force is used to prevent losses.  A law enforcement officer is responsible for their own safety in an immediate and personal way, and can only fire when personally threatened.  The soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is responsible for his own safey as well, but in a different way, and very rarely is he alone, and he can fire when a target is present – whether or not that target is a personal threat to his own life.  The law enforcement officer usually can’t run and hide from a thug with a knife 10 feet away, but the soldier can usually take cover from fire 500 yards away and call for an airstrike.

Apples and oranges.

Chaffetz notes that DHS is currently sitting on more than 260 million rounds of ammunition. Their current claimed rate of expending bullets works out to between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer each year, while the Army averages 350 per officer. Nyak agreed with the math, but insisted that DHS goes through roughly that amount every year, almost exclusively for training. But if it’s for training, there’s another question to be answered.

Another question is why so many hollow-point bullets are being purchased?

Federal law enforcement fires a lot more rounds per year.  They shoot a lot more.  They are issued ammunition for training and duty, and that ammo is the same.  The last thing you want to do is issue out some full metal jacket ammo for training and have someone carry it to the field.  The reason jacketed hollow points are used is because they’re very effective at energy transfer.  They’re good for stopping bad guys.

And that’s what law enforcement does.  Law enforcement shoots to stop.  Not to kill, but to stop an immediate, personal threat on the officer’s life.

That’s an important distinction, and one that needs to be made.

Full metal jacket rounds penetrate easily, but don’t do as much energy transfer.  They don’t create wounds that are immediately disabling the same way that JHP rounds do.  There is a plethora of information about this on the internet.

Full metal jacket:

Jacketed hollow point:

The duty and training ammo is the same because the agent training with it will know how it fires, how it recoils, and they’ll know how to handle it.  FMJ loads do not recoil the same out of a defensive pistol as a JHP duty/defensive round, either.  Ammunition is manufactured to its use, and JHP is manufactured to have to stop a threat, so the ammo is hotter, and recoils differently, which has effects on follow-up shots.

Pistol rounds in FMJ are not the best there is for self-defense, and are often wholly inadequate.

The duty and training ammo is also the same because if the agent were to bring a magazine loaded with FMJ to the field, and if the agent needed to stop a threat, the rounds wouldn’t perform as well.  If that threat overpowered him and the agent was killed, his family would have a pretty decent basis for a lawsuit on their hands.  Even if it were found to be the dead agent’s fault, the lawsuit would be expensive, as would the loss of an agency’s investment in a trained agent.

How many millions of dollars would that be, and how many millions would the repercussions be as compared to just buying JHP for everything?  Bean counters do those kind of numbers and find it’s probably easier just to spend the money once and just use JHP.

-

There have also been specific incidents in which FMJ rounds have been used in the field by federal law enforcement, and failed.

In 2009, a Border Patrol BORTAC unit in Arizona tracking rip crews ran into an armed smuggler group, one of whom decided to engage one of the BORTAC members with a revolver.  The BORTACer did what he could to try to avert the attack by attempting to blind and disorient the smuggler with a high-power flashlight and get the subject to surrender.  Even knowing he was spotted and caught, the smuggler turned to fire. The BORTACer had to fire 14 rounds with his rifle, 11 of which hit his assailant.  The first 10 were center-of-mass hits, and did not stop the attacker.  The smuggler, despite receiving 10 wounds from a rifle, was still able to fire all 6 rounds from his revolver at the agent.  What stopped the attacker was the last round – a headshot.  The ammunition used by the BORTACer was 55 grain FMJ.

Would the smuggler have died due to the FMJ in the body?  Yes, later.  But as demonstrated, it did not stop his attack.

The law enforcement officer is responsible for all of his rounds.  He’s not shooting in a war zone.  The military soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is not responsible in the same way for every round he fires.

HotAir quotes IBD here:

As former Marine Richard Mason recently told reporters with WHPTV News in Pennsylvania, hollow-points (which make up the bulk of the DHS purchases) are not used for training because they are more expensive than standard firing-range rounds. “We never trained with hollow points. We didn’t even see hollow points my entire 4-1/2 (years) in the Marine Corps,” Mason said.

As already noted, with pistols especially, performance is different, both for training purposes and especially for application purposes in the field.

The reason the Marine Corps doesn’t train with hollow points is twofold.  One is that the Hague Convention of 1899 outlawed the use of soft points and hollow points (so even though the US didn’t agree, they weren’t exactly in use much), and the other more important reasons are that the military may have to engage targets through concealment and/or cover, or to destroy materiel as well as personnel.

A JHP round will deform when it hits an object, as it’s supposed to mushroom out and cause more immediate damage to an immediate assailant that needs to be stopped RFN.  An FMJ round is much more likely to penetrate objects and still retain some performance, enough to cause disabling wounds or injuries which will take a combatant out of the fight, even if it’s a few minutes later from blood loss.

For example, federal law enforcement is unlikely to shoot through walls or doors because they have to be sure of their target, and prove ability, opportunity, and intent of a lethal force threat to be legally justified in a shooting.  If someone runs into a building to hide, you probably don’t keep shooting, because they’re probably no longer an immediate lethal force threat.  It’s time to call the negotiators and sit.

By contrast, if a Marine or soldier has a target that runs into a building to hide, shooting through walls or doors is quite often an option.  That’s because the person they’re going after isn’t even called a threat, but a target.  The military doesn’t have to wait to fire in self defense (discussions of bad ROEs aside), the military identifieds targets and destroys them.  Law enforcement reacts to threats.

-

JHP and FMJ rounds are used for different things.  DHS knows enough to buy it cheap and stack it deep, just like serious citizens have done for decades.  That’s just a matter of economics.  Is it good to ask questions?  Absolutely.

But it would be better to find out what Napolitano knows about terrorists that get in the country, and maybe why she’s allowed to not answer questions.

Or why Eric Holder, who’s killed DHS personnel in ICE and USBP through his Fast and Furious program, isn’t in prison.

Senate Judiciary Hearing: “Proposals to Reduce Gun Violence: Protecting Our Communities While Respecting the Second Amendment”

Senate Judiciary Page has the link to live video here.

Interesting to hear the left argue forcefully for greater government expansion and destruction of the US citizens’ rights.

Lessons from Pravda: “American’s Never Give up Your Guns”

From Pravda writer Stanislav Mishin:

Pravda newspaper front page (around 1950s). The head article title says: From the Soviet Leadership (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

…it (gun control) is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question.

The gentleman from the former Soviet Union has it spot on. Control is the issue. Think about this for a few minutes. If the second amendment falls, what of the others? Free speech, illegal searches and seizures (already happening to some in the name of “security”), having a national guardsmen in your home,  and the right to not incriminate yourself just to name a few. A further look at amendments and the constitution suggest that if the 2nd amendment falls that it would also be possible for the 22nd amendment to be ignored as well. Think on the ramifications of that, a president seeking a third term….

Mr. Stanislav’s article discusses the disarmament of the Russian population, particularly the former members of the tsar’s army:

Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lying guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot.

Trust politicians much? I don’t. Again the idea of the slippery slope applies. If we give up our right to bear arms, what recourse do we have as, “The People,” if some or all of our enumerated rights disappear? I would go into unenumerated rights but Senator Fienstein just wouldn’t be able to comprehend my argument or I would have to direct her to John Locke if she knows who that is.

And now for the Soviet Union’s slippery slope:

… the Reds learned from their Civil War experience. One of the first things they did was to disarm the population. From that point, mass repression, mass arrests, mass deportations, mass murder, mass starvation were all a safe game for the powers that were. The worst they had to fear was a pitchfork in the guts or a knife in the back or the occasional hunting rifle.

Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government” – Thomas Jefferson

 

Obama’s National Insider Threat Policy

Very strange, this is.

Presidential Memorandum — National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs

This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems.

The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel.

The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security.

BARACK OBAMA

HT to ZeroHedge and LibertyBlitzkrieg.

He’s certainly not concerned about people like leftist hero Bradley Manning, but he may well be concerned about ATF whistleblower John Dodson or Petraeus’ mistress Paula Broadwell talking about secret CIA prisons.

Update: Just in case it disappears, a screenshot as of 11/29/12 648 EST.

Why DHS Ordered 450 Million Rounds of .40 S&W From ATK

I’ve seen this story reported several times, and have been asked about it by friends.

The first place I saw the story was on Sipsey Street Irregulars, and here, then here, here, Alex Jones got in on it here, the Blaze got in on it, and so on.

I posted why over at Sipsey Street, I’ve explained to people I know, but since it keeps coming up, I’ll repost it here (and hopefully the explanation will make it to the top of search engine results so people can stop freaking out about it – and freak out about the things that need to be freaked out about – like the F&F coverup, the implications of the commerce clause being expanded to make you buy a product, etc.).

Quoting myself:

To give some idea as to how the big numbers make sense, a USBP trainee goes through about 2000 rounds before leaving the academy during training, practice quals, and basic proficiency. A class is 50 students, so that’s over 100,000 rounds per class, not counting remedials, which may bump the number up to 110,000 rounds or so.

In 2007-2012, the academy was graduating some 100+ classes per year, resulting in easily 10,000,000 rounds per year just to new agent training.

A USBP agent goes through quarterly firearms qualification, which is a 72 round course, usually with some additional training tossed in, so about 400 rounds per year minimum that they will fire in the course of training.

Ammo issue is usually 150-300 rounds per quarter (depending on stations’ budgets and ammo availability), so each agent will get 600-1200 rounds per year issued to them, of which they might only use 400 for official training – the rest is proficiency ammo for them on their time, or sometimes for proficiency fire after quals if there’s more training scheduled.

Take let’s say 25,000 agents times around 1000 rounds per year and you get some 25,000,000 rounds per year. That’s not including firearms instructors (who go through ammo at the cyclic) or Bortac/Borstar and SRT or whatever they’re calling it these days.

Spread this out over a potential 5 year contract to supply up to 450,000,000 rounds to DHS, and 125,000,000 could easily go to USBP alone, if not closer to 150-200M.

Add in the potential for what the academy was burning through in the last 5 years of the hiring pushes and you’re looking at over half that 450M going to USBP. Hiring for USBP is down, but ATK has to plan for it anyway.

Add in other branches of DHS, US Marshals, FBI, US Customs, etc., almost all of whom use the .40 S&W as their primary round, and you end up with a very plausible, normal number to base a contract off of.

US Marshal service just had a hiring push for 5000 applicants – if they take even 1000 of those, with training similar to USBP, that puts them in the 2 million round mark, if over 5 years, 10 million round mark just for new hires. Add in quarterly qualifications, and you’re looking at millions upon millions more rounds.

450 million rounds is a good forecast number for the 5 year period (1 + 4 extension).

Hope that clears this up a bit.

One other thing to look at is the same thing effecting reloaders – materials prices keep going up.  Copper keeps going up, which increases the costs of ammo.

Anybody who’s been shooting for a few years has seen what’s happened.

The ammo types there are different types of .223 and 5.56mm, and amounts are per 1000 rounds.  To compare to today, a mere 5 1/2 years after wards, the XM193 is $9.79 for 20 rounds.   That’d be $489.  To make the chart Al-Gorean:

If you order 450 million rounds at today’s prices, you don’t end up paying tomorrow’s prices.  Given the rate of increase in ammo prices, due to monetary inflation and metals prices and shipping costs due to fuel prices, buying now for tomorrow makes more sense.

Or, as milsurpers have said for a long time about ammo: “Buy it cheap and stack it deep.”  It makes economic sense to buy against increases, it makes good sense to buy the amount you’re going to use in the future.  450 million rounds is not unreasonable.  It just seems odd at first until you crunch the numbers.

I’d be more worried about prospective ATF head Andrew Travers’ past work with the anti-gun Joyce Foundation.

GSA Idle

Heard it on the Schnitt Show today, but Jawa Report was the first place I saw it online:

FOX has the story as well.

And from ABC:

“It takes a lot of work to spend $3,000 a person and at a time when unemployment was nearly 10 percent, Americans were suffering and GSA was enjoying the good times and doing so with high-ranking political employees,” Issa said. “This administration knew about this 11 months ago and they didn’t act until the press got wind of it. This is typically what has been happening in this administration. They are only transparent when they are discovered.”

ABC News spoke to Terlaje on Thursday afternoon, but he wouldn’t comment, referring reporters to GSA spokesman Adam Elkington.

“This video is another example of the complete lack of judgment exhibited during the 2010 Western Regions Conference,” Elkington, deputy press secretary at GSA, said. “Our agency continues to be appalled by this indefensible behavior, and we are taking every step possible to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

Hey, how about we add to that 10 percent unemployment with a few useless GSA stooges?