[AWB]Dems prep ground for 2014 Electoral Defeat

[MichaeltheGreat]

What the ****, people?

Commnist. Gummint gon' taek are gunz an put chips in us to track us an controle are thots an all. Gon' git me more ammo fer my 49 gunz so's ah kin dufend freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedum frum you Amurka hatin' commnists

[MichaeltheGreat]

It's not as stupid as you think. The prices Dick's and Gander Mountain are selling the ammo at are below what is currently market price online, so they're buying it up and flipping it for a tidy profit.

What's stupid is the idiots paying over market for it. Gun and ammo makers and their NRA shills must be laughing their way to the bank.

[DinoDoc]

What the ****, people?

DHS purchasing 1+ billion rounds of ammo is bound to put a crimp in the supply chain somewhere.

[regexcellent]

DHS purchasing 1+ billion rounds of ammo is bound to put a crimp in the supply chain somewhere.

Truthfully, I doubt it. The government buys loads of rounds and its demand doesn't change much. It's not a huge shock to the demand.

[regexcellent]

What's stupid is the idiots paying over market for it. Gun and ammo makers and their NRA shills must be laughing their way to the bank.

They're laughing at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Diane Feinstein more than they are the gun owners. Truthfully, while the ammo shortage was originally caused a panic about some kind of ban (especially an online ammunition sales ban), now it's just that there probably isn't enough ammo going around to meet base demand.

[Hauldren Collider]

I think we're seeing the aftershocks of the initial surge in demand. First of all, you had a ton of people panic-buying, driving the price up to the point where regular consumers didn't purchase any. Then you had a bunch of people (regular consumers and panic buyers) placing back-orders, some of which took a long time to fill or maybe are still being filled. Then you have a group of people who simply haven't bought ammo because of the price for the last few months that are now running low and buying again.

Basically the panic placed a shock on the market that will take a long time to smooth out. At this point I don't think it has much to do with fear of a weapons ban.

[The Mad Monk]

An AR in .227? Do you mean .223? .223, 9mm, and .22LR are the calibers that have been hit worst. Most large hunting rounds are still reasonably available, and shotgun rounds can still be found in quantity for a decent price.

.223? No wonder I can't find it.

[Lonestar]

DHS purchasing 1+ billion rounds of ammo is bound to put a crimp in the supply chain somewhere.

(1) It's up to that amount, over several years
(2) It's contracted for small woman/vet/minority owned businesses. So it wouldn't affect the big boys supply chain that much(Winchester/Remington/Federal etc).
(3) If I go shooting at the NRA HQ range, I see jackasses come in, buy the max rationed, and then leave without renting a lane.

LOL ITS THE GUV'MENT CAUSING THE SHORTAGE.

The reason why we have shortages is because people are buying **** up, plain and simple, and the big ammo manufacturers aren't increasing manufacturing either because they were at about capacity before...or they see it as a spike and not a new norm. OTOH, I was at the Quantico PX last Saturdya and the guy behind the gun counter said that while demand is still up form this time last year, he's been able to keep rifles on the wall for the past month because "the dam burst" and all the third shifts the big firearm manufacturers started in January are greatly increasing EBR availability. It's ammo that's the problem, because the big ammo companies aren't expanding manufacturing to meet demand

[DinoDoc]

(2) It's contracted for small woman/vet/minority owned businesses. So it wouldn't affect the big boys supply chain that much(Winchester/Remington/Federal etc).

Source?

[Lonestar]

Source?

Short answer?

I have a coworker who just moonlights at my place of work; she works managing DHS contracts during the day as a GS-14.

That said if you look at some of the Award notifications for the contract you will see that they are awarding them for, well, small businesses. Yes, someone like Winchester gets the bigger chunk of the contract; but what happens is they sub it all out to smaller businesses.

It's like that with Government IT. I don't work for a major defense contractor. I'm employee #50 for a small, woman-owned business. If, say, Northrup bids on a IT contract they have to prove that approximately half of the personnel on the contract will go to small businesses that are minority/vet/woman/disabled own.

People are blaming "the government" when it's their own retarded mass panic buying up all the ammo.

I tell you what, it sure as **** ain't the fault of the government that I can't find .22LR anywhere, even if we WERE to magically believe that DHS is "buying up all the ammo" and causing the lack of supply.

[Hauldren Collider]

Wait, so the government specifically discriminates for businesses owned by Politically Correct Victims? That's incredibly retarded. When did that policy start? Fuck's sake, that's absurd.

[DinoDoc]

Wait, so the government specifically discriminates for businesses owned by Politically Correct Victims?

How old are you? Seriously, if one believes Lonestar about who is getting the contracts and its effect that policy is a common one wrt government procurement.

[Hauldren Collider]

It's completely bat**** insane. Which is par for the course for the feds, I suppose.

[Lonestar]

Incidentally, the Military Times had a pretty good article that sums it up.

Talk of the Department of Homeland Security’s recent ammunition solicitations has gone from the fringes of the internet to the mainstream in websites like Forbes. I was disappointed by the Forbes article – rather than talk cold hard facts, it was rife with ill-informed speculation.

Government and military procurement is a very complex topic; so complex, in fact that it’s sometimes hard to discern best value practices from actual waste, fraud, and abuse. However, there are practically no examples of nefarious acquisitions intended to be used for the subjugation of the American populace. These ammunition contracts and solicitations are no exception.

Before we begin, it’s important to understand that an RFQ (request for quote) or solicitation is not a purchase. When Infowars says something like “the Department of Homeland Security is planning to buy a further 750 million rounds of ammo in addition to the 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets already purchased earlier this year,” or “Following controversy over its purchase of around 1.2 billion bullets in the last six months alone, the Department of Homeland Security has put out a new solicitation for over 200 million more rounds of ammunition,” the reader is led to assume, naturally, that DHS has actually purchased that amount of ammunition. That is simply not the case. A solicitation is the equivalent of a want-to-buy ad on Craigslist, writ large. It’s not an actual purchase.

So if DHS hasn’t actually bought 1.2 or 1.6 billion rounds in one year, then what have they bought, and what do they plan to buy? Well, a year ago they awarded an IDIQ contract for up to 450 million rounds of .40 S&W ammunition over the next 5 years. They plan to buy, over the next 5 years, 63 million rounds of a wide variety of ammunition ranging from 12 gauge birdshot to .38 special wadcutter to .30-06 FMJ ammo; there are even line items for .308 blanks.

An IDIQ, or indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, means that DHS didn’t simply buy 450 million rounds of ammunition at one time. The contract is spread out over a 5 year period, and it’s an upper limit, meaning up-to-90 million rounds of .40 S&W each year from that up-to-450 million round award. DHS could, if they wished, buy 73 million rounds the first year, 84 million the second, and so on. It depends on their needs at the time.

There is, as mentioned above, an Infowars article which refers to a “750 million round purchase,” but the PDF linked in said article is a solicitation which only contains line items which add up to 63,256,000 rounds. Confused? Here’s what a DHS spokesperson had to say about that:

“One solicitation under Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) has a contract ceiling of UP TO 750 million rounds of training ammunition, a maximum quantity allowing FLETC flexibility over the next 5 years for training of over 90 federal agencies. A separate 5-year department-wide contract allows the purchase of UP TO 450 million rounds of duty ammunition for our law enforcement officers and agents. This contract is intended to be used by all DHS components, except the U.S. Coast Guard, who uses U.S. Department of Defense ammo contracts. This contract is part of the Department’s strategic sourcing efforts to combine multiple previous contracts in order to leverage the purchasing power of the entire Department to efficiently procure equipment and supplies at significantly lower costs.”

Put simply, there’s no way that FLETC is going to actually buy 750 million rounds of ammunition. Given the historical use of ammo at FLETC of approximately 15 million rounds per year or less, it’s probably going to be pretty close to the line items in the PDF linked above which, again, total 63 million rounds over a 5 year time frame.

But isn’t a total which might approach 90 or 100 million rounds per year excessive?

DHS is a massive umbrella agency, with over 100,000 armed law enforcement personnel according to a DHS spokesperson. If we divide 90 million by 100,000, that means each agent gets 900 rounds per year to shoot. That isn’t a whole lot, considering that civilians going through handgun training courses sometimes shoot twice as many rounds – in a single weekend.

Furthermore, federal agents, including those under DHS, generally use the same ammunition for duty and practice. Currently, it’s a .40 S&W jacketed hollow point made by Federal, commonly known as the HST. Most of DHS’s evil, banned-for-war, elderly-and-baby-killing hollow points end up going through paper targets and into dirt berms. Each CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agent is currently given 250 rounds per quarter, or 1000 rounds per year. While things may differ from agency to agency, that lines up fairly nicely with the above math for the 450 million round contract.

In other words, that 5-year, up-to-450 million round ammo purchase is just what the agencies need to sustain proficiency for the next 5 years.

There are also references to a purchase of 200 million rounds of .223 Remington ammunition. However, the information at the link provided by the website shows a 5 year IDIQ contract for up to 165 million rounds, not 200 million. Yes, it’s a lot of ammo. But divided by the number of agents who have to practice with M4-platform weapons, over 5 years…well, we already covered that.

The Department of Homeland Security is not stockpiling ammunition for use against American citizens, nor are they buying excessive amounts of ammunition. If anything, I believe that 1000 rounds per year is not sufficient to maintain a high level of proficiency with a duty weapon.

In the end, there is absolutely no truth to the statements permeating the Internet about how “DHS bought 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition last year.” That number was reached through either basic math errors or willful ignorance on the part of those who make a living by crying wolf. That this rumor has traveled so far in conservative circles is especially ironic given the fact that a) buying in bulk is a fiscally smart decision, and b) hiring more DHS (CBP) agents to, among other things, better protect the border means buying more ammunition.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In response to comments that DHS must fund the entire amount of a contract, here are a couple of excerpts from the FLETC solicitation:

TL;DR:

The DHS hasn't ordered the amount you threw around; the amount they will order is a big ???...but probably less than the total. It is likely that none of the contracted companies even have started manufacturing for the contract. Buying in bulk makes fiscal sense.

[Lonestar]

Wait, so the government specifically discriminates for businesses owned by Politically Correct Victims? That's incredibly retarded. When did that policy start? Fuck's sake, that's absurd.

That policy started decades ago. Like, either the Reagan or Carter Administrations.