Thread: DHS won't explain its order of 450 million hollow point bullets

DHS won't explain its order of 450 million hollow point bullets

Published: 04 April, 2012, 01:48

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) researchers use advanced modeling and simulation equipment as they work on the DHS Control Systems Security Program (CSSP) in this handout photo taken April 28, 2010 at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho (Reuters/Chris Morgan/Idaho National Laboratory)

After 9/11, the United States government created the Department of Homeland Security to prevent future acts of terrorism and deal with other domestic issues. Now in order to keep doing such, the agency is asking for 450 million hollow point bullets.

The DHS has signed off on an “indefinite delivery” from defense contractors ATK that will include, for some reason, nearly 500 million high-power ammunition for .40 caliber firearms. The department has yet to discuss why they are ordering such a massive bevy of bullets for an agency that has limited need domestically for doing harm, but they say they expect to continue receiving shipments from the manufacturer for the next five years, during which they plan to blow through enough ammunition to execute more people than there are in the entire United States.

“We are proud to extend our track record as the prime supplier of .40 caliber duty ammunition for DHS,” reads an official statement from Ron Johnson, ATK’s president of Security and Sporting, who adds that his group will also be giving up weaponry to the DHS subdivision of ICE, or Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.

While ammunition itself seems not too unreasonable of a request by a major federal entity that emphasizes domestic durability and safeguarding the country from coast to coast, the choice — and quantity — of its hollow point order raises a lot of questions about future plans for the DHS. ATK says they won their contract with the US government by being able to provide them with 450 million HST bullets, which it describes as “the next generation in high performance duty ammunition.”

What does that mean, exactly? On their website, the contractor claims that the ammunition is specifically designed so that it can pass through a variety of obstructions and offers “optimum penetration for terminal performance.” Or, in other words, this is the kind of bullet designed to stop any object dead in its tracks and, if emptied into the hands of the DHS a few hundred million times, just might do as much.

Since its inception, the Department of Homeland Security has not only absorbed ICE and other government entities, but has arguably extended its powers much more broadly than many had imagined. Under the recently authorized Trespass Bill, H.R. 347, protesters that allegedly disrupt occurrences acknowledged by the DHS of being a National Special Security Event will be charged with a federal crime. As the DHS gains more and more ground in fighting terrorism domestically, the US at the same time has turned the tables to make its definition of terrorist way less narrow. With any American blogger or free thinking on the fringe of what the government can go after under H.R. 347, or the National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the indefinite detention of US citizens without charge, the DHS could just be blasting through what’s left of its budget to make sure that its roster of agents across the country can get in their target practice over the next few years.

Of course, the government might just want to ensure that each one of those agents is more than able to assassinate Americans not just around the globe, but on their own soil. After all, for all of those angsty alleged Americans engaged in terrorism abroad, the US has the largest military in the history of the world to deal with them. In that case, they could argue that it only makes sense to equip their armed forces at home as well.

DHS won't explain its order of 450 million hollow point bullets — RT

related: http://www.alipac.us/f19/usda-orders-326-000-rounds-ammunition-homeland-security-stays-quiet-over-450-mi-254441/#post1270742

How much small arms ammunition is produced each year.

No exact number.
About 39% of the small arms ammo in the world is made in the US.
Annual production of the world is about 14 BILLION rounds of ammunition.

ITT Technical Institute

ALERT: DHS Buys Up Millions of Rounds of .40 Caliber Hollow Point Ammo – Police State Takeover

2 Comments
The Intel Hub News Brief
April 6, 2012

Note: You can download the mp3 of the podcast here.



In the last three years numerous domestic US government agencies (with Homeland Security being the main agency) have ordered a total of over 750 million rounds of .40 caliber ammunition.

On top of that they have ordered an unknown number of bullet resistant checkpoint booths.

When you couple this with the military’s 1033 program, a clear cut picture emerges.

Welcome to the American police state.

Sources

The US Government Has Ordered Over 750 Million Rounds of .40 Caliber Hollow Point Ammunition in the Last Three Years The US Government Has Ordered Over 750 Million Rounds of .40 Caliber Hollow Point Ammunition in the Last Three Years :

DHS Purchases Bullet Resistant Checkpoint Booths Amid Large Scale Ammo Buildup DHS Purchases Bullet Resistant Checkpoint Booths Amid Large Scale Ammo Buildup :

The Pentagon’s 1033 Program: Giving Free Military Equipment to Police Departments Around the U.S. The Pentagon


ALERT: DHS Buys Up Millions of Rounds of .40 Caliber Hollow Point Ammo – Police State Takeover :

ATK producing ammo for Homeland Security

(5) |
|
|



Published: March. 13, 2012 at 12:39 PM

Advertisement

ANOKA, Minn., March 13 (UPI) -- As many as 450 million rounds of .40-caliber ammunition are being produced for U.S. government agencies by ATK of Minnesota.
The order comes under an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for HST bullets.
"We are proud to extend our track record as the prime supplier of .40-caliber duty ammunition for (Homeland Security), ICE," said Ron Johnson, president of ATK's Security and Sporting group. "The HST is a proven design that will continue to serve those who keep our borders safe."


ATK was the incumbent and won the contract with its HST bullet. The HST is a hollow-point round that holds its jacket even after passing through barriers.


ATK said the contract features a 12-month base performance period and four option years. The ammunition will be produced at the Federal Cartridge Company facility in Anoka, Minn., with deliveries of the rounds to begin in June.


Read more: ATK producing ammo for Homeland Security - UPI.com

interesting why they being a non-military agency is arming like they are going to war ..

450 Million Hollow-Point Bullets: Department of Homeland Security

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Written by Gary North on March 30, 2012



Question: Why has the Department of Homeland Security ordered 450 million hollow-point bullets?

Answer: Because American voters are dum-dums.

I’ve got a million of ‘em! I’ve got 450 million of ‘em!

Here is a press release.

ATK Wins Five-Year, Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity Contract for .40 Caliber Ammunition from DHS, ICE

Additional .40 Caliber Ammunition Contract with 450 Million Round Potential Demonstrates ATK’s Leadership in Ammunition Manufacturing

ANOKA, Minn., March 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — ATK (NYSE: ATK) announced that it is being awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreement from the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS, ICE) for .40 caliber ammunition. This contract features a base of 12 months, includes four option years, and will have a maximum volume of 450 million rounds.

For the record, ICE is the U.S. Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement Agency.

Why do the DHS and ICE need this many rounds of ammunition? What scenario are they planning for? It would be nice to know. I would like to do a little planning for this scenario.

This is an election year. Members of Congress are very busy. It would be too much to expect to hope that an oversight committee (or five) would bring in the directors of both agencies, place them under oath (rare in hearings), and ask them to produce the written plans outlining the scenarios that mandate 450 million rounds of dum-dums.

Dum-dums are bullets that expand on contact. They produce horrible wounds inside the body. The standard military round does not expand. The use of dum-dums has been prohibited by international laws of warfare ever since 1899.

They are legal for the DHS and ICE to use in domestic warfare.

Who are the proposed targets?

Useful Notes: The Laws And Customs Of War

The (Third) Geneva Convention (of 12 August 1949), Article 4.A(2), defines a Lawful Combatant as “(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having fixed distinctive insignia recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; and (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.”

It is not true that all is fair in love and war. Especially in war. There are a considerable number of treaties governing the conduct of war. Even the utter chaos of war itself has standards.

Note that war has usually been governed by some sort of law or custom throughout history, but they differ in various times and places.

Dum-Dum Bullets

A quick way to show that a killer is really a bad guy is to have their bullets having a cross cut into the tip. This will cause the bullet to expand when it enters the body, causing far more damage. Since hollow points are permitted in most non-military applications and are more reliable (jacked dum-dums have a disturbing tendency to leave the jacket in the barrel of the gun, nevermind the fact that they don’t expand that reliably) dum-dums are usually used to show how bad someone is. Or that setting pre-dates the invention of hollow points. Named after an arms factory in India, by the way.

In 1899, the Hague Convention stipulated that bullets must not be designed to expand or flatten within the body, causing grievous harm.

Hollowpoints

These bullets, which expand in a person’s body, are prohibited in formal warfare, but allowed in domestic law enforcement and actually required in some jurisdictions for hunting. Their downsides are that they have poor performance against armor and barriers as well as sometimes not expanding correctly.

450 Million Hollow-Point Bullets: Department of Homeland Security | Newsnet 14

Why is DHS buying 450 million rounds of ammo?

PolitiFact Texas | Chain email says Homeland Security purchasing many bullets perhaps in anticipation of civil unrest or an invasion

Chain email says Homeland Security purchasing many bullets perhaps in anticipation of civil unrest or an invasion

Stock up on soup. Account for children and pets. Lock the doors, dim the lights.

A chain email forwarded to us by a reader March 24, 2012, suggests the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has mysteriously ordered a lot of bullets. Specifically, the email says, the department "has just executed an order for enough rounds of .40 caliber ammunition to kill every man, woman and child in the United States."

"A shocking new defense contract entered by the 'department' to secure a massive amount of ammunition, with the option for infinite supply and infinite delivery, raising the question of just what they are preparing for?" the email says. "Massive civil unrest? An invasion by a foreign power? The order is to supply 450 Million Rounds of .40 Caliber ammunition which is more than one bullet for every single person in the United States."

Yikes! Might the government be stocking up to battle civil unrest or resist an invasion?

The declared number of bullets certainly exceeds the nation’s population. As of March 2012, according to U.S Census Bureau estimates, the country was home to 313 million people, making the ratio of bullets to residents about 1.4 to 1 -- if the email is firing on all cylinders.

For insight about the .40-caliber bullet, we turned to Jeffrey Magers, a former police officer who teaches at California University of Pennsylvania. Magers said the described bullet is a standard police round used around the country. "They’re intended to flatten and do the most damage without passing through the body. It’s a shock-effect type of thing," he said in a telephone interview. "It’s intended to stop the threat."

And did the government agree to buy 450 million rounds?

The chain email links to a March 18, 2012, entry on the conservative Fellowship of the Minds blog referring to a posting on the PR Newswire website. On that site, we pulled up a March 12, 2012, release from Minnesota-based ATK, an aerospace, defense and commercial products company.

The release says ATK has been awarded an "Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quality" agreement from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for .40 caliber ammunition. "This contract features a base of 12 months, includes four option years, and will have a maximum volume of 450 million rounds," the release says. It adds that ATK already was supplying such ammunition.

The release, noting that deliveries are expected to begin in June 2012, quotes Ron Johnson, president of ATK's Security and Sporting group, saying that the bullet will "continue to serve those who keep our borders safe."

Next, we reached Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler who said by email that the cited quantity of up to 450 million rounds is "the quantity projected to be used over the next five years."

"This contract is intended to be used by all (agency) components, except" the U.S. Coast Guard, he said, which uses ammunition obtained through the Defense Department. According to a Homeland Security web page, the agency’s 20-plus components include the Transportation Security Administration, which handles passenger screening at most airports; U.S. Customs and Border Protection, entrusted with keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the country and with enforcing immigration and drug laws; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the Secret Service.

Chandler’s email continues: "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, including the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center," another Homeland Security component, "which trains nearly all federal law enforcement personnel, to efficiently procure equipment and supplies."

On its website, the Georgia-based center says it trains law officers for 90 federal agencies and also officers in state, local, tribal, and international law enforcement. Chandler said that in the 12 months through September 2011, over 11,000 students at the center fired over 11 million rounds of .40 caliber ammunition, primarily in basic training.

Chandler said earlier that Homeland Security oversees more than 135,000 weapons-carrying officers.

Our calculation: If those officers go through all the possible 450 million rounds at the same rate each over five years -- admittedly, an unlikely balance -- each officer will have used about 667 bullets a year.

Asked how the decision to purchase up to 450 million of the .40-caliber rounds compares to previous Homeland Security buys, Chandler said only that because the 2012 contract combines multiple previous contracts, it is different than "previous contract vehicles."

Finally, we talked through the information provided by Homeland Security with Magers who said he believes the arranged-for rounds could be used by domestic law enforcement officers on duty, in training and in keeping their skills up. "Not only does every officer carry ammunition on their body and in close proximity, but every so often ... they are required to go out and qualify with that weapon. Any one officer is going to account for a lot of rounds in a year," Magers said. Also, he said, rounds get cycled out as officers ensure their equipment is ready when needed.

"On its face, the type of ammunition and the amount of ammunition over a five-year period of time doesn’t sound extraordinarily excessive," Magers said. Of the chain email’s mention of a bullet for every man, woman and child, he said: "Whoever came up with this one bullet per person is trying to sensationalize this. That’s borderline irresponsible."

Our ruling

Homeland Security has contracted to buy up to 450 million .40-caliber bullets -- and that total exceeds the nation’s population. Significantly, though, the purchase contract covers five years; there’s no indication the agency is piling up the bullets in a hurry.

More significantly, we found nothing to support the email’s ominous suggestions. Rather, the large size of the contract is explained as a way for the government to buy in bulk to save money on ammunition used routinely for training officers in a wide variety of agencies.

We rate the email Mostly False.

About this statement:
Published: Monday, April 30th, 2012 at 6:00 a.m.

ATK, press release, "ATK Secures .40 Caliber Ammunition Contract with Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS, ICE)," March 12, 2012

Chain email, "Why Did The DHS Just Order 450 Million Rounds of .40 Caliber Ammunition?" (received by PolitiFact Texas March 24, 2012)

Emails (excerpted), responses to PolitiFact Texas, Matthew Chandler, press secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, April 18-23, 2012

Telephone interviews, Jeffrey Magers, assistant professor, Professional Studies, California University of Pennyslvania, April 20 and 23, 2012

Written by:W. Gardner Selby
Researched by:W. Gardner Selby
Edited by:John Bridges

How to contact us:
Keep up to date with Politifact Texas:
© 2012 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

PolitiFact Texas | Chain email says Homeland Security purchasing many bullets perhaps in anticipation of civil unrest or an invasion

Preparing for Civil War: Chart Shows DHS Has Bought Hundreds of Millions of Rounds of Ammo Since 2009

2 Comments
By Alex Thomas
theintelhub.com
July 15, 2012



In the last six months many articles and reports have been written that detailed the hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition that the Department of Homeland Security has purchased since Obama took office in 2009.

This astonishing amount of purchased ammunition has lead many to speculate and believe that homeland security is actively preparing for what they believe will be a bloody and extremely violent American uprising and or civil war.

When you couple this large scale buildup of ammo with bulletproof checkpoints, law enforcement bulletins labeling everyday Americans as possible terrorists, and a series of videos that painted middle class Americans as the new Al Qaeda you can clearly see that at least portions of DHS are planning for some sort of violent confrontation with the American people.

The chart below (broken up into three screen shots), put together by James Smith of the Prepper Podcast Radio Network, displays all the types of ammunition, the frequency of the purchases, the quantity, and the company that the ammo was purchased from.





Why is the Department of Homeland Security buying ammo as if they are about to go to war if that is not their exact plan?

It is also important to consider the fact that Obama has given DHS extraordinary powers in the event of an emergency regardless whether or not they created it in the first place.

Sadly, there is little to nothing standing in the way from rogue agents carrying out a false flag which in turn would give the entire agency dictator like powers, turning America into a full fledged Fascist police state.

Preparing for Civil War: Chart Shows DHS Has Bought Hundreds of Millions of Rounds of Ammo Since 2009 :
Related Articles:

• DHS Agencies to Buy Up to 7,000 New 5.56x45mm NATO Personal Defense Weapons”
  
• U.S. Army Orders $266 Million Worth of Ammo Amid Re- Education Camp Claims and Martial Law Drills ...
  
• Martial Law Drill on the Streets of Minnesota
  
• Did EG&G Engineer Alien Electro-Gravidic Technology? AlienDigest.com

Got to send ammo to go with the weapons.

Russia Says It's The U.S. That's Sending Weapons To Syria : The Two-Way : NPR


　
US says weapons sent to Somalia
The US has confirmed that it has sent weapons to Somalia's UN-backed transitional government. ... and its allies but Ethiopia and Kenya both declined to send ...news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8119976.stm