First Woodward, Now Bernstein

Remember a few months back, Bob Woodward criticized the White House about the sequester limiting military movements, and then was threatened?

Of course, Woodward was blasted by his fellows in the media for criticizing Obama, and it’s not like Woodward was actually going to say anything serious, since Woodward never thought there were any questions worth asking about Benghazi or Fast and Furious.  He made one comment that wasn’t wholly in lock-step with the Obama-loving media and was verbally attacked and threatened for it.

Now today, Carl Bernstein is calling out Obama for targeting Associated Press reporters.

He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities.  He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation.  Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.

Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”.  Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists.  This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech.  His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech.  This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.

Bernstein:

“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”

Y’know what that means, Carl?  Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you?  It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.

From the Obama administration targeting FOX news and calling it “destructive” for having a viewpoint that opposes his to Obama specifically blaming Rush Limbaugh for all the problems in America, to calling anyone who is opposed to the socialist manifest destiny an “obstructionist” or “destructive”, this administration, from the President down through all of his true-believer lackeys, are on the same page.  If you oppose them and their autocratic mania to tell you how to live, you must be destroyed.

Bernstein is a dinosaur.  He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear.  He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now.  He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.

He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things.  He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth.  The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.

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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration.  The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident.  They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?

Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.

Obama Blames US For Gun Violence In Mexico

I’m going to use the same title that Real Clear Politics did.

This is the same Obama who had Eric Holder’s DOJ and ATF sending guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels.  This is the same Obama who hushed Fast and Furious up by exerting executive privilege.  He sent guns to Mexico.

This is not a question of American citizens’ rights, this is a question of the US government purposely arming narcoterrorists in order to have this talking point, claiming the 90% lie over and over.

I can’t think of many things more insulting or downright foul to hear from our President other than his own crimes being blamed on our rights – as was intended.   He is now going international with the demand that our rights go away because he committed crimes… to deny us those rights.

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This is like a rapist saying “not only did she deserve it when I did it to her, but that proves my point, we have to keep the world safe from women like her who cause rape”.

Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious Lawsuit Slowly Moving and the Wide Receiver Story

First update on the civil suit against the Justice Department, from UT San Diego:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge seemed skeptical Wednesday of the Justice Department’s bid to dismiss a congressional lawsuit seeking records related to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled federal gun-tracking operation in Arizona.

It was not a gun-tracking operation.  It was not bungled.  It did exactly what it was set out to do, it sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, and it forced US gun stores to sell to people who should never have gotten guns.  There was no tracking involved, as whistleblower John Dodson stated – they were not allowed to track guns sent south, and they were intended to be recovered at crime scenes.  People buying guns included felons who could not have passed NICS background checks, except that the government gave them permission to buy guns by letting them pass background checks.

When asked about the breakdown, Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the NICS System, said the FBI had no comment. However, an ATF agent who worked on the Fast and Furious investigation, told Fox News that NICS officials called the ATF in Phoenix whenever their suspects tried to buy a gun. That conversation typically led to a green light for the buyers, when it should have stopped them.

From the UD SD story again, the judge is at least doing her job:

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sharply challenged the department’s claim that federal courts have no jurisdiction in the dispute. Department lawyer Ian Gershengorn said the battle over the documents should be resolved by the checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches.

“I’m a check and balance,” countered Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “The third branch exists.”

Well, she seems better than other Obama appointments.  And she seems to understand that there has been no “check and balance” when the Department of Justice and the president have simply claimed executive privilege and hushed everything up – which is the reason for the lawsuit.  She is seeing things up close, so she probably has to acknowledge what’s going on.  She’s being presented with information directly, and can’t just ignore things like the media does.

To some degree, this is also a story of how the media not only gets it wrong, but how the media is carrying water for Obama.

The department has turned over thousands of pages of material on the operation itself. The continuing dispute is over documents describing how the department responded once Congress started investigating.

That’s what the Justice Department sent as “documents”.  Page after page after page.

Gershengorn said that if the suit were dismissed, Congress had other powers at its disposal, such as the power of the purse. He said that negotiations and accommodation between the House and the executive branch are messy and contentious, but that the system allows for accountability with voters.

That is absurd, insulting, and the kind of thing that would get Sam Adams heating up the tar and sending somebody to get feathers.  The DOJ is hushing up a the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of mexican citizens, hushing up their program that is the kind of violent criminal conspiracy that would make headlines for years if it were done by organized crime, but instead, is hushed up because the media simply refuses to report it, and refuses to report the truth because they love their great leader.

Saying that Congress can simply use “the power of the purse” to reduce budgets for departments is absurd.  No one is held accountable for this:

People need to go to prison, not have their department funding meddled with.  The DOJ lawyer Gershengorn should be with them as an accomplice after the fact to murders.

House lawyer Kerry Kircher called the notion that there haven’t been meaningful negotiations and accommodations “preposterous.”

“We’ve been negotiating for four months,” Kircher said.

He also said the House was at a disadvantage.

“This is an asymmetrical relationship here,” Kircher said. “They have the documents. We don’t have the documents.”

As to Congress’ powers, such as reducing spending for the executive branch, he said, “All that means is they get less money” – not that the committee gets the documents.

Presented with this kind of thing, I’d like to say the judge won’t just rule in favor of who appointed her, but there’s little telling.

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David Codrea at Examiner.com has some info on “Guns Across the Border“, a book that tells the story of Operation Wide Receiver.

“Operation Wide Receiver,” a precursor to “Operation Fast and Furious” wherein U.S. guns were bought by straw purchasers and “walked” under the noses of ATF investigators into Mexico, has been the subject of numerous Gun Rights Examiner reports. The central figure in those reports was Mike Detty, a gun writer, a firearms dealer, and the confidential informant who literally risked his life over the course of years to do what he believed was right, only to find the obvious criminals weren’t the only ones he couldn’t trust.

Operation Wide receiver really was a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico knew that guns were coming, the Mexican authorities knew guns were coming.  The smugglers turned out to be good at smuggling and got a lot of guns past both US and Mexican authorities through a variety of tactics.  Smugglers are good at smuggling?  Who’da thunk it?

Fast and Furious, by contrast, was not a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico (ATF attache Darren Gil) and the Mexican authorities had no idea guns were coming, and the purpose was to find guns at murder scenes in Mexico, about which ATF supervisors were “almost giddy”.

Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious were two different things.  Bob Owens at PJ Media did a solid bit on this explaining it further:

Wide Receiver sought to track and interdict guns being smuggled south using a combination of RFID-tracking devices embedded in the shipments and overheard surveillance aircraft. Wide Receiver failed because of the limitations of the technology used, compounded by the ineptness of its installation and the unexpected resourcefulness of the cartel’s gun smugglers.

As a result of the mistakes made in Wide Receiver, guns were lost: approximately 450 made it into Mexico. As a result, the botched operation launched in 2006 — and in this instance, actually botched — was shut down in 2007.

Compare the mistakes of Wide Receiver to the operations launched under Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, which had the advantages of learning from the postmortem failures of Wide Receiver two years before.

Fast and Furious used neither tracking devices nor aircraft, ran interference for smugglers with local law enforcement on multiple occasions, and federal agents were not allowed to interdict weapons.

Wide Receiver shut down within a year after 450 weapons went missing in a botched law enforcement operation. Fast and Furious purposefully ran at least 2,020 weapons to the Sinaloa cartel without any intention of arresting the straw purchasers and smugglers. Other operations in other states — CBS News’ Attkisson cites allegations of “at least 10 cities in five states” — allow the possibility that (if the other operations were as prolific as Fast and Furious) Holder’s Department of Justice may have intentionally sent more than 12,000 guns into criminal hands in the U.S and Mexico, enough to arm three U.S. Army brigades.

Law enforcement operations sometimes go horribly wrong, and every indication is that Operation Wide Receiver executed by the ATF during the Bush administration while Alberto Gonzales was the attorney general was a “keystone cops” operation of the first magnitude. It was a horrible failure.

But Fast and Furious was no accident.

Manchin And Toomey Still After Your Rights

From Newser, the Black Tie yacht drunks are back and still after your rights, peasant:

(Newser) – The push for stricter gun laws might not be quite so dead after all in the Senate. The New York Times reports that efforts are “quietly” underway to get something done on background checks and illegal trafficking. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, the co-sponsors of the background-check bill that got yanked last week, say they have been talking to colleagues to get rid of some objectionable loopholes. One potential compromise would allow a person who lives in a rural area to sell a weapon to someone without having to find a sporting goods store to facilitate.

So they’re admitting that they’re targeting “urban” people?  At least they’re getting more honest about their racism.

Looks like that’ll be a 14th Amendment violation for lack of equal protection under the law.

A separate initiative to crack down on illegal trafficking, which includes buying a weapon for someone who can’t legally own one, is being spearheaded by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and Republicans Kelly Ayotte and Chuck Grassley.

That last name is very interesting.  Chuck Grassley has been the spearhead of the senate move against Obama’s Fast and Furious program wherein the ATF gave guns to the Mexican narcoterrorist cartels.  He’s well aware of how anti-gun this administration is, he’s seen how the Department of Justice has held back and said nothing about Fast and Furious, and he’s well aware of the violent hatred of the Constitution demonstrated by this adminstration when it used the ATF to undermine the Second Amendment in order to push for gun control and oppression of citizens.  He’s very knowledgeable on the subject.

The story notes this at the end:

Gun-control supporters are working on a national campaign to put pressure on those in the “no” camp.

Yup.  They never stop.  Ever.  They have a need to destroy your rights.  It’s what they do, it’s all they do, and they will never, ever stop until they have their boot stamping on a human face forever.

Harry Reid, History and Tyranny

Via Drudge, from Real Clear Politics:

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) mocked Second Amendment rights activists while announcing his support for a ban on assault weapons and limits to high-capacity magazine clips on the Senate floor today.

REID: In the 1920s, organized crime was committing murders with machine guns. So Congress dramatically limited the sale and transfer of machine guns. As a result, machine guns all but disappeared from the streets. We can and should take the same common-sense approach to safeguard Americans from modern weapons of war.

Starting from the end of this statement and working back, modern weapons of war aren’t legal (without a lot of licensing) precisely because of the National Firearms Act of 1934 that Reid is alluding to.  But wait, you say – the National Firearms Act came out in 1934?  Yes, yes it did.

Organized crime became an issue in the 1920s because of a great early Progressive idea to make people better: Prohibition.  Prohibition was so important to those who “know what’s best” that the government went out and poisoned US citizens intentionally:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

Early progressives had decided that intemperance needed to be squashed, even if it meant murdering some 10,000 citizens who drink by having government poison them.

The 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, and just like that, the revenue stream for bootleggers and organized crime evaporated overnight.  Coupled with the beginning of the Great Depression exacerbated by FDR’s policies impacting the entire economy, organized crime wasn’t making the same kind of money and thus it wasn’t the same threat it was in the 1920s.

Reid continued saying he’d vote for Feinstein’s “Assault” Weapons Ban:

That is why I will vote for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban – because we must strike a better balance between the right to defend ourselves and the right of every child in America to grow up safe from gun violence. I will vote for the ban because maintaining law and order is more important than satisfying conspiracy theorists who believe in black helicopters and false flags. I will vote for the ban because saving the lives of young police officers and innocent civilians is more important than preventing imagined tyranny.

There is no “balance” as you move towards tyranny, even if you mock those who warn of tyranny.  There can be no right to grow up safe.  These are wonderful abstract concepts that are high-minded, but impossible.  You cannot “grow up safe”.  The world cannot be made into a safe place.

“Maintaining law and order” would mean enforcing laws first.  Obama doesn’t even enforce gun laws.  Mocking people who oppose the bill as conspiracy theorists just means you don’t have an argument.

The Obama administration has actively engaged in a conspiracy against the Second Amendment by shipping guns to narcoterrorist cartels in Mexico.  You can read all about it.

Lastly, Reid claiming to want to save the lives of young police officers by destroying the Second Amendment they swear an oath to – as part of the Constitution, just means that he cares about protecting organs of the state but not about the rights of the people – the same rights that cop swears to uphold.

As to “saving the lives of innocent civilians” being more important that “preventing imagined tyranny”, scroll back up and read about the Chemist’s War.  The US government actively poisoned people in order to push its Progressive “good idea” of Prohibition, whether people wanted it or not.  The same time that the Senate was looking at banning machineguns, the same government was poisoning people.  Also in the early 1930s, not only was the government banning the right to own machineguns “for the greater good”, they were also infecting black people with syphilis as guinea pigs in the Tuskegee experiment.  There were also forced sterilizations and such going on in the name of eugenic racial improvement, another Progressive idea, all “for the greater good”.

Reid, just like politicians at that time would’ve, is arguing that people should surrender their rights for their own good because government really wants to help them… It wants to help them so much it murders them for their own good – from poisoning people to support Prohibition to sending guns to narcoterrorist cartels to kill people to support gun control.

There is no “imagined tyranny”, there are just increasing levels of tyranny.  With history as our guide, we know we need to stay well-armed to stay safe, and we know that a government that mocks us ultimately means us harm.  They aren’t by, for, and of the people.

Harry Reid is also indulging in the Broken Window Fallacy.  The complaints he makes today about protecting children and cops are ones that are visible.  The tyranny that others warn against isn’t here yet, and takes time to materialize.  But this isn’t some Manbearpig fantasy, we have all of human history to see the repetition of tyranny as Innocents Betrayed illustrates above.  We know what happens when governments get powerful.  We have seen the US government in the last four years send guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hush it up afterwards.  We have seen the US government poison over 10,000 people just to push Prohibition.

There is no imagined tyranny.  It exists, creeping, always encroaching, and always there.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Gunwalker Update: Univision Wins Peabody Award For Coverage

From Guns.com:

Spanish channel Univision has won a Peabody Award for their Fast and Furious reporting.  Most all American media outlets choose to ignore the ATF’s botched Gun Walking operations where over 2500 guns ended up in Mexican cartels hands.

Univision’s Fast and Furious reporting.

It’s worth noting that they do start out with a lie that 70% of guns in Mexico come from the US, which Stratfor disproved back when the claim was 90%, but beyond that, it’s not too bad.

Harry Reid’s S 649 – No Private Sales and Reporting Requirements

From Govtrack:

‘(t)(1) Beginning on the date that is 180 days after the date of enactment of the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2013, it shall be unlawful for any person who is not licensed under this chapter to transfer a firearm to any other person who is not licensed under this chapter, unless a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer has first taken possession of the firearm for the purpose of complying with subsection (s). Upon taking possession of the firearm, the licensee shall comply with all requirements of this chapter as if the licensee were transferring the firearm from the licensee’s inventory to the unlicensed transferee.

Oh, and it gets better:

‘(3) For purposes of this subsection, the term ‘transfer’–

‘(A) shall include a sale, gift, loan, return from pawn or consignment, or other disposition;

So let’s say a friend I’ve known for 10 years suddenly finds out that his ex-wife’s new boyfriend is a violent thug who assaults him when he goes to pick up his daughter for visitation, and my friend I’ve known for 10 years is concerned for his own safety.  Can’t loan him a gun.

Let’s say my girlfriend has a temporary job in a new town, and she’s concerned for her safety.  She’s been to the range, but doesn’t own anything yet, and would like to have a gun in the house.  Can’t loan her a gun.

“SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” apparently doesn’t mean much anymore.

Reporting requirements for stolen guns get really draconian:

SEC. 123. LOST AND STOLEN REPORTING.
(a) In General- Section 922 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end–

‘(aa) It shall be unlawful for any person who lawfully possesses or owns a firearm that has been shipped or transported in, or has been possessed in or affecting, interstate or foreign commerce, to fail to report the theft or loss of the firearm, within 24 hours after the person discovers the theft or loss, to the Attorney General and to the appropriate local authorities.’

If you own a firearm, you have to report the theft.  Most people do anyway because they want their gun back, but this potentially criminalizes individuals who have been the victims of theft.  It also gives police a tool to lean on citizens who’ve done nothing wrong.

It adds a greater governmental burden to exercising your rights, which acts as a barrier to more people enjoying their rights.  Buy a gun and something happens, and the government may come after you for the actions of criminals.  Why?  Because going after the citizen helps disarm them, and it’s certainly easier than dealing with criminals.

There’s also a large section of the bill on “trafficking guns” all of which was already illegal, even if Obama’s ATF still violated the laws in Fast and Furious.  The government already violates the next law they’re putting out that you have to abide by, while they simply ignore the murder of hundreds of Mexican citizens and two US federal agents because they don’t care.  Rules are for peons like you, not the Ruling Class like them.

Katie Pavlich ACU Blogger of the Year

Via HotAir:

Congrats, Katie!

Gunwalker Update: 2 Years Later

Katie Pavlich interviewed by Citizen Watchdog – a good review and overall summary for anyone who hasn’t been following it.

This video was a bit before the 2 year mark, a few months back, posted here in HawaiiReporter’s 2-year retrospective.

Can You Debunk Something That’s Already Been Debunked?

HotAir (among other places) links today to a NRO piece about DHS ammo purchases.

Last year, the Social Security Administration put out a procurement request for 174,000 rounds of “.357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point pistol ammunition,” prompting a few on the Internet to work themselves up into something of a frenzy. “It’s not outlandish,” claimed Paul Joseph Wilson, one of a team of professional paranoiacs on the Infowars website, “to suggest that the Social Security Administration is purchasing the bullets as part of preparations for civil unrest.” “Something strange is going on,” harmonized Breitbart’s William Bigelow. Even Mark Levin was concerned. “I know why the government’s arming up,” he deduced. “It’s not because there’s going to be an insurrection; it’s because our society is unraveling.”

The Social Security Administration’s purchase was by no means an anomaly. A year earlier, the unlikely pair of the Department of Agriculture (320,000 rounds) and the National Weather Service (46,000 rounds) had both put out tenders for ammunition. And slightly less odd, but still staggering, were the FBI’s professed intention to purchase up to 100 million “hollow point” rounds and the Department of Homeland Security’s concurrent request for 450 million rounds. The Department of Education got in on the weapons-supplying spree, too, purchasing “27 Remington Brand Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns.”

Gee, it’s almost like this question was asked & answered almost a year ago.  And then half a year ago, when the Social Security Administration story came up, it was asked & answered again.

And it was even answered by Social Security directly:

As we said in a recent post, our office has criminal investigators, or special agents, who are responsible for investigating violations of the laws that govern SSA’s programs. Currently, about 295 special agents and supervisory special agents work in 66 offices across the United States.  These investigators have full law enforcement authority, including executing search warrants and making arrests.

Our investigators are similar to your State or local police officers. They use traditional investigative techniques, and they are armed when on official duty.

Media reports expressed concerns over the type of ammunition ordered. In fact, this type of ammunition is standard issue for many law enforcement agencies. OIG’s special agents use this ammunition during their mandatory quarterly firearms qualifications and other training sessions, to ensure agent and public safety. Additionally, the ammunition our agents use is the same type used at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

If one were inclined to tin foil hattery, it’d be more interesting to ask why NRO is doing a story on something that’s a year old.

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A solid point is made in HotAir’s comments:

We have been getting plenty of e-mail about purchases and contracts for ammunition by government agencies, which seem to have prompted a run on ammunition by private consumers and the shortages that these runs usually entail.

State ammunition acquisitions didn’t prompt a run on ammunition, by the People.

Dictators who would disarm the People prompted those runs.

This was, first and foremost, about firearms, not bullets.

OhEssYouCowboys on March 5, 2013 at 3:31 PM

Government contracts have next to nothing to do with runs on ammo.  Runs on ammo come after runs on guns, because guns need ammo.  Not rocket science.  I’d be surprised anyone emailing them would think that (I’d doubt Ed does, though the sentence could be taken that way), but I guess they’re agitated about something from a year ago, so who knows?

From the NRO piece, a bit of reassurance that isn’t reassuring, because while the ammo orders aren’t sinister, other things are:

Whatever the federal government has become, it is not yet plotting violence against the people.

Tell that to these guys:

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Update: Since HotAir linked back to us, here’s a repost of the original from April 2012.  Now, mind you that entire post was written before the Sandy Hook murders and before the current maniacal leftist push for gun control that’s spurred on purchasing at the cyclic rate; plus there’s another year’s worth of inflation, metals prices fluctuations, and new costs of doing business that manufacturers are now faced with.  All of those factors are going to change prices even further.

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.

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As a final note, for those who’ve gotten this far – having read the repost and all – and who wonder why they’re buying JHP rounds and not FMJ for training, I believe the answer is a combination of contracts, bean counters and lawyers.  If you’re a contractor and you can convince an agency to always “train how it fights” – which isn’t a bad thing, it may be more expensive for the government, but you may make better margins.  With the organizations I’m familiar with, ammo allocated for federal training of new agents is allocated to the agent – if the agent drops, the company gets the ammo back, the govt. doesn’t get a refund.  Instructors may be able to use that student’s allocation for other students, so sometimes it’s not wasted, either.

If you standardize your purchases, it’s less to keep account of – in inventory, purchasing, allocations, acquisitions, and in usage.

Were you to issue training ammo that accidentally got taken to the field and proved insufficient to stop a bad guy who then injures or kills the agent, the savings on using FMJ or other training ammo might not be worth the wrongful death lawsuit for failing to equip the agent properly.  So it’s also an expensive CYA.  If you spend an extra $5 million on ammo but prevent a $10 million lawsuit, it’s economically worth it.

It also goes to economy of scale.  Buy it cheap, stack it deep.