Billions of rounds of hollow points, black helicopters- what does it all mean?

Isn’t this conspiracy theory unworthy of those who consider themselves rational, informed…and conservative? And isn’t this conspiracy paranoia so 2012? Or does it predate even earlier to this?

The Blaze (March 2012, fer crissakes!):

This is not the first time DHS has placed such an order, however. In 2009, it signed a contract with Winchester for the procurement of 200 million hollow points.

The order may seem unusually high, but gun experts I talked to said it is not necessarily unusual and simply reflects a long-running practice by DHS and law enforcement agencies to use any remaining budget surplus on items routinely used and that would not be called into question. The idea being that if an agency does not use its entire budget in expenditures, the government will lower its budget the following year.

On the other hand, the decreased retail availability for hollow points does drive up demand, and hence price for such ammunition. Whether the consequence is an intended one, remains to be seen.

So is this a calculated move by the government to curb ammunition availability to civilians or is it simply another way for it to spend money?

Steve McGough:

The claims hollow point ammunition is not used for training or qualifying is total bull excrement. The claims ranges do not ever allow hollow point ammunition is total bull excrement. Some ranges have backstops or setups that are not set up for hollow point rounds, or it is a range preference. I just spent a few minutes visiting the websites of at least six different ranges with both indoor and outdoor facilities and not one of them mention a ban on hollow point ammunition, but most mention incendiary, tracer and explosive bullets can not be used. Those are not hollow points.

Again, law enforcement and civilian shooters can easily go through 750 rounds a day during training.

There are more than 1,000 Connecticut State Troopers. If they train only five days a year, they can easily go through 2.5 million rounds a year.
There are more than 13,000 sworn FBI agents. If they train only five days a year, they can easily go through 32 million rounds a year.
There are more than 34,000 New York police officers. If they train only five days a year, they can easily go through 85 million rounds a year.

As for the claims law enforcement would never, ever practice with hollow point rounds, tell me … where are all the orders for the full metal jacket ammunition the law enforcement agencies are using for training? Or maybe the trolls think they are not practicing at all and just saving up for the big election finally?

Look, hollow point rounds are – in general – safer for all those involved except for the intended target since it will expand and not penetrate as far as a full metal jacket round. Interested in some information about self-defense rounds, ballistics, pistols and rifles? Try reading this.

DHS Buys in Bulk to Save You Money:

DHS contracted with a manufacturer for 40 caliber ammunition not to exceed 450 million rounds. Like with most of their contracts, prior to negotiating DHS headquarters in Washington reaches out to all the agencies under their umbrella, including state and local police forces, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), etc, and asks them all how much of a certain item they need. Once they have an account of the full amount of an item needed and have reviewed those requests, they put out a request for an “Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity” (IDIQ) contract. This contract allows them to purchase up to a certain number of needed items without requiring them to purchase a specific item and allows them to purchase this item over a certain number of years. This is a common form of contract used by DHS for many of their needed supplies, including working dogs, computer equipment, vehicles, etc.

In this case, DHS entered into a contract that allows them to purchase up to 450 million rounds of 40 caliber ammunition over the next five years. They cannot exceed 450 million rounds and are not required to purchase 450 million rounds. Basically, they have a tab with a manufacturer to order more rounds as they are needed over the next five years – not a onetime ammunition order.

Setting up contracts in this manner allows for a cheaper purchase price, saving money over the long-term. In fact, contracts like this one saved taxpayers $336 million in FY2011 alone. Additionally, purchasing in bulk like this helps DHS headquarter conduct better oversight over its agencies and ensures consistency among all the agencies under DHS. So, in this case CPB, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Secret Service, and other DHS agencies will all use the same 40 caliber round so these rounds can move between agencies if need be – another way to potentially save money down the road.

To put this more concisely, just like you and your family take that monthly trip to Sam’s Club or Costco to get your bulk needs cheaply, DHS also buys in bulk because it saves the American taxpayers money.

If you take the number of agencies that will be using this ammunition – CBP, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, the DHS police force, and all the guards that protect the various buildings these agencies are housed in, and spread that out over 5 years, you start to see that 450 million rounds really isn’t that large of an order. Especially considering it is used for training purposes like firing range and live fire exercises, on-the-job use (though that is very limited), and to shore up their supplies. In fact, there are 65,000 – 70,000 law enforcement personnel at DHS who would be covered under this IDIQ ammunition contract. If DHS were to purchase all 450 million rounds over 5 years, then that would equate to only about 1,384 rounds of ammo per year per law enforcement personnel (or about 155 rounds per month (about 10 magazines worth of ammo per month) or 3-4 rounds per day) assuming the lower estimate of only 65,000 law enforcement personnel at DHS. Considering those agents go through training exercises several times per year, that is not a lot of ammunition.

In this post-9/11 world we need to make sure those who are tasked with protecting our homeland both from threats abroad and at home have the training and equipment needed to carry out their duties to help ensure our way of life. Firearm proficiency is an important part of any federal officer’s training and for that reason the purchase of sufficient amounts of ammunition is critical to maintaining an effective protective force. However, with all government spending Congress needs to keep an eye out for any mismanagement or misappropriation of funds in federal agencies, and the congressman will continue to be vigilant on this front to ensure our nation’s tax dollars are being spent wisely. He wants to thank all of his constituents for bringing this issue to his attention and encourages everyone to continue to reach out to him with any questions or concerns they may have.

CNN:

Praise the Internet and pass the ammunition: the blogosphere is roiling with conspiracy theories over a Social Security Administration shopping list for 174,000 hollow-point bullets.

Depending on whom you believe, police who protect Social Security Administration officers are either preparing for impending financial doom by purchasing lethal ammo to put down rioting citizens, or they’re just making a standard purchase of ammunition for a federal police agency.

It all began last month when the agency, which is primarily responsible for distributing benefits to the disabled and retired people, posted an announcement seeking bids for 174,000 hollow-point bullets.

Why? cried some bloggers.

Infowars, a website operated by right-wing talk show host Alex Jones, wanted to know if the agency was preparing for “civil unrest.”

~~~

Conspiracy theorists had previously speculated that a purchase of hollow-point bullets by the Department of Homeland Security was similarly meant to quell impending riots. A few years ago, theorists similarly questioned why the Federal Emergency Management Agency was stockpiling body bags and other supplies, suggesting the agency was preparing for civil collapse.

In the face of the furor, the Social Security Administration’s public affairs shop — which spends most of its time issuing releases about speeding disability decisions or looking up benefits information — issued a statement explaining that its 295 agents need the bullets for target practice and to protect the agency’s 66 offices across the nation.

“These investigators have full law enforcement authority, including executing search warrants and making arrests,” the agency said in an August post. “Our investigators are similar to your state or local police officers. They use traditional investigative techniques, and they are armed when on official duty.”

Hollow point bullets are standard-issue items for many police agencies, the Social Security Administration said. The bullets expand when they hit a target and can help prevent injuries to bystanders from bullets passing through a body, according to police.

Investigators “use this ammunition during their mandatory quarterly firearms qualifications and other training sessions, to ensure agent and public safety,” the administration added.

This is just the latest in a long history of uniquely American anti-government conspiracy theories, said Kathryn Olmsted, a University of California at Davis history professor and author of “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories in American Democracy.”

That another one would surface in the midst of a contentious election cycle and continued unease over the nation’s financial future is not all that surprising, Olmsted said Tuesday.

But this one, she said, seems particularly tenuous.

“It strikes me as one of the more extreme conspiracy theories,” Olmsted said. “I’m surprised it has any traction.”

Yet it does.

Let’s not believe anything the commie news network would say, however, no matter how reasonable.

FOX News:

Obscure federal agencies triggered a firestorm of conspiracy theories this week after they put out orders for thousands of rounds of deadly hollow-point bullets.

But the agencies, most recently the Social Security Administration, are trying to put a damper on the speculation — noting the ammunition is “standard issue” and simply used for mandatory federal training sessions.

“Our special agents need to be armed and trained appropriately,” said a message on the official blog for Social Security’s inspector general office explaining the purchases.

The bullet purchases drew widespread attention as the website Infowars.com published several stories on them that were linked off the widely read Drudge Report and other sites. Infowars.com catalogued a string of recent purchases — first by the Department of Homeland Security, then by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and then the Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration solicitation, posted Aug. 7, called for 174,000 rounds of “.357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point pistol ammunition.”

Infowars.com speculated that the purchases were being made in preparation for “civil unrest,” imagining a scenario of economic collapse where seniors could cause “disorder” if denied their Social Security benefits.

But the Social Security Administration statement, posted Thursday, noted that their agents need firearms and ammo in the course of training, investigations and responding to threats against offices and employees.

“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,” the office said.

The agency said it has 295 special agents across 66 offices in the country. “These investigators have full law enforcement authority, including executing search warrants and making arrests,” the statement said.

As for concern about the type of bullets — hollow points, which expand upon impact — the statement said the type is “standard issue” and is used during “mandatory quarterly firearms qualifications and other training sessions.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, found itself scrambling to respond to a similar report this week about an order for 46,000 rounds of ammo. Though the agency initially indicated it was for the National Weather Service — leading to questions about why the National Weather Service could possibly need so many bullets — a spokesman clarified the bullets are actually meant for the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement. A “clerical error” resulted in the order saying the ammo was for the weather service.

Spokesman Scott Smullen said the error’s been fixed in the bidding system. He, too, said the ammo is “standard issue” and will be used by 63 enforcement personnel at NOAA during qualifications and training sessions.

“NOAA officers and agents enforce the nation’s ocean and fishing laws to ensure a level playing field for fishermen and to protect marine species like whales, dolphins and turtles,” he said.

According to NOAA, the specialized agents are supposed to have 200 rounds in their “duty bag,” and qualification and training requires another 500-600 rounds per agent.

Tom Roberson:

A multitude of conspiracy theorists latched on to a couple of recent American Thinker articles I wrote about the government purchasing large amounts of hollow-point ammunition for obscure agencies, but they misunderstood the point I was trying to make about the size of the federal government.

The first American Thinker article, published on August 14, 2012, pointed out the solicitation of 46,000 rounds of .40 S&S JHP ammunition for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service and asked why the meteorologists at the National Weather Service had a need for ammunition. An alarmed AT reader contacted her congressman, who also happens to be my congressman, who promptly looked into the matter and discovered that the solicitation on the FedBizOps website had mistakenly identified the National Weather Service as the purchasing agency instead of the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement as was originally intended. So, the matter was quickly resolved as to the intended agency requesting the ammunition, but another question arose as to the existence of obscure federal agencies having their own law enforcement agencies.

In my second AT article, published on August 19, 2012, I pointed out the government response to the Internet outcry over ammunition purchases by the National Weather Service, and asked why the government was purchasing large amounts of hollow-point ammunition and just how many obscure federal law enforcement agencies exist. An order of 46,000 rounds of ammunition is not unusually large given the number of officers and the need for practice ammunition to keep up shooting skills over the course of a year. The use of hollow-point ammunition is troubling until it is explained that hollow-point ammo is preferred by law enforcement due to the fact that these rounds tend to stay within the body and not pass through to potentially harm innocent bystanders. Hollow-point ammo has become standard in law enforcement.

I was surprised by the number of comments each of these articles received from individuals convinced that the government is planning something nefarious to keep Barack Obama in power past the election. There were stories of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) concentration camps and stockpiles of plastic coffin liners as the conspiracy theorists loosed their imaginations to feast upon their irrational fears. Many of the comments came from individuals whom I recognized from their many comments to various AT articles and respected for their insight on the topic at hand. It appears that few are immune to the powerful lure of a well-spun conspiracy theory.

I am not inclined towards conspiracy theories for several reasons. First, Occam’s razor, or the law of parsimony, is the principle which recommends the simplest explanation from among competing hypotheses. Usually, the simplest explanation is the best. Any military member will tell you that the more complex a plan is, the more likely something will go wrong. Conspiracy theories tend toward the complex with multiple people interacting in well-coordinated and well-timed ways that just don’t happen in the real world where things go wrong, participants miss their cues, and the unexpected happens constantly. Successful operational plans are intentionally conceived to be as simple as possible to minimize the likelihood of anything going wrong.

Second, conspiracies rely on large numbers of people to keep a big secret, and human nature is not conducive to the success of a conspiracy. Even President Obama couldn’t resist the temptation to immediately tell of the killing of Osama bin Laden along with sensitive details of the raid. Now a book is coming out from one of the members of Seal Team 6 who participated in the raid and was the first man through the door of bin Laden’s bedroom on that fateful night. His motivation is to set the record straight and shift credit away from a credit-hogging Obama using the incident for political points back toward the soldiers actually responsible for the raid. There are a multitude of motivations to tell the big secret, and the more people involved, then the more motivations that come into play.

Third, conspiracy theories make for great fiction and Hollywood plot lines with incredible entertainment potential. The tendency to veer off into the world of imagination to find an explanation for the unexplainable is just too great. When big events that change history occur, they are sudden and shocking to our collective psyche. We demand a big explanation to go along with a big occurrence, when it’s much more likely to be a simple explanation. The Kennedy Assassination has spawned a multitude of conspiracy theories involving the Mafia, the CIA, the KGB, Fidel Castro, and others acting either alone or in some combination to explain a truly shocking event. However, it turns out that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy for the simple reason that he was a pathetic nobody who sought to be somebody in the world and committed a heinous act to garner attention. A simple explanation to a massive event that leaves one feeling unsatisfied that something so huge could be pulled off so simply by one lone individual seeking attention.

It turns out that the FEMA concentration camps mentioned in various comments to my AT articles are really National Responder Support Camps constructed as a counter to the government’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina. FEMA’s performance in New Orleans demonstrated the woeful inadequacy of the government in responding to natural disasters. These camps were constructed to pre position supplies and provide a support base to disaster recovery teams in order to improve the government response to the next disaster. There is nothing nefarious about them, and their solicitation can be found here. Anything the government does for the right reasons can be misused by someone in charge who has a nefarious agenda. We must be careful not to allow a situation where someone can misuse the government against us, but we shouldn’t assume every government action is automatically sinister. Popular Mechanics has an excellent article that debunks many of the conspiracy theory myths about FEMA camps.

In my AT articles, I first intended to highlight the disturbing purchase of ammo by the National Weather Service and question the need for this agency to purchase ammo. When it turned out that this was a simple clerical error, I shifted focus to the size of ammo purchases and the number of obscure federal law enforcement agencies in an attempt to highlight the explosive growth of the federal government. Hey, mistakes do happen and government employees aren’t immune to making the occasional innocent mistake which I consider perfectly reasonable and understandable. Given the number of federal law enforcement agencies and the number of agents involved, the size of the ammo purchases becomes reasonable given that some of these were multi-year solicitations. These are simple explanations and plausibly explain the situations under consideration.

Snopes

The OIG responds (in 2012, mind you)

Will we see this conspiracy theory push-pedaled again in 2014 for another round of paranoid hysteria running through the conservative blogosphere?!