From The American Rifleman's

Thanks, good read. Makes good sense to me.

 

Sorry, doesn't make sense to me. In fact, Squire, your comment that AR isn't an administration lap dog gets seriously called into question when one actually examines the -- as it turns out -- bogus claims of the article.

Either all these "law enforcement officers" are taking a heck of a lot of gun range time, or this is just more BS. Take, for example, AR's claim that the SSA employs 295 fully-empowered special agents. That's not quite true. The number is actually 230.

http://oig.ssa.gov/newsroom/blog/2012/08/oigs-special-agents-enforcing-federal-laws

However, they are largely paper pushers who rarely get out of their offices, each agent in 66 offices across the U.S. dealing primarily with fraud cases in disability, which doesn't require running around chasing "bad guys" but investigating paperwork and looking for the discrepancies that may lead to indictments. They have firearms, but I doubt half of them even know where they are.

NOAA Fisheries law enforcement officers rarely if ever carry firearms. The 63 agents mentioned in the AR article are analysts, though they do go into the field to inspect fishing boat logbooks and check paperwork.

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ole/slider_stories/2013/o82613_beyond_the_badge.html

They don't have a great deal of need for firearms, though the article is accurate in saying they do carry them.

But the biggest joke of the entire article is the mention of Homeland Security. First of all, the AR article outright lied about the number of rounds per agent, even if the figure was 65,000 -- which, as I'll show below, it isn't. That figure would actually come to 6,924 rounds per agent. As shown below, the actual number of armed agents under DHS is 34,600, which comes out to 13,006 rounds per agent. Additionally, the article treats that 450 million rounds of .40 caliber ammo as the only purchase DHS has made. It inexplicably ignores the fact that DHS also has contracts to purchase another 1.15 billion -- yeah, billion with a "B" -- rounds of various ammos, including .223 caliber bullets, and both .357 and .45 caliber hollow points over the next two years. What the hell do they need that kind of firepower for? Even if they each fired off 100 rounds of ammo a week at the gun range -- and they won't be firing hollow points at the gun range -- they would barely use twelve percent of those 1.6 billion rounds!

As I mentioned, the article is disingenuous from the start. The 65,000 number used in the article is grossly misleading. It includes in the figure civilian, unarmed personnel. It has to, to reach the total of 65,000. There are ICE 6,500 ICE agents, 7,680 Border Patrol (what AR calls "customs and border protection agents"), approximately 5,000 uniformed and plain-clothes Treasury/Secret Service agents, and about 15,000 Customs and Immigration Services agents who carry weapons. The AR article makes mention of TSA, but only a handful -- fewer than 400 -- of the 47,000 TSA employees are allowed to carry firearms. That's a total of about 34,600 armed agents of the various DHS divisions, which is far less than the claim made by AR.

Nope, Squire, your article is bogus. It doesn't begin to explain why the government wants all that ammo.

 

I rarely pay attention to the comments attached to the end of a blog or online article. For most to take the time and effort to sign into a website to leave a comment, it requires a great deal of offense, or pique, at what the author, or someone else who left a comment, said. In other words, those comments tend to be diatribes of one sort or another.

 

Well, no offense, but I gave them a quick perusal and that's what they looked like to me. But I didn't read any of them carefully, I'll admit. Which one(s) specifically?

 

OK, I took 20 minutes to read through the comments. No one took the time to do the simple math and divide 450 million by 65,000 -- which as I said is a totally inaccurate number -- and find out the article just outright lied. No journalist is that stupid as to be so bad at math. And while there were a couple mentions that Secret Service, for example, doesn't even use .40 cal ammo, no one took the time to discover the number of agents is hugely exaggerated. And one guy did call it a "bogus article."

I'll stand by my analysis. I'm amazed the NRA would print such garbage.