Fresh perspectives arrive every week on the new toys the Department of Homeland Security is buying. That includes 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition and 2,717 Iraq War surplus light tanks. Is the Department simply acting like a child in a candy store? Or is the administration planning a coup d’état against the people?

DHS buys a lot of toys

Have a look at the toys DHS is buying. Start with the 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. Ralph Benko at Forbes online discusses this at length. The government can’t deny buying the ammo. The Associated Press reported on the ammo buy a month ago. Here is a purchase order for some of it. Note the middle line item: hollow-point rounds.

Here the sources seem confused. Benko says:

At the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years. In America.

Is he sure? His source, Andrew Buncombe of the Belfast Telegraph, says US forces used 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammo a year. Nor were they very efficient. Buncombe says they fired 250,000 rounds for every insurgent they killed, and even had to import ammo from Israel.

But DHS has a problem, too. They say all their law-enforcement officers shoot up 15 million rounds a year in training. As WND observes, DHS could train their “troops” for over a hundred years on the supply they have on hand.

And what about those 2,717 light-armored tanks that the government brought back from Iraq and then refitted for use on American streets? As CNAV said before, those tanks are good to have in an urban war zone. But who imagines that American cities will dissolve into riots of that kind?

Who, indeed? Former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska imagined that. (The link to the original Facebook post seems to be no longer valid)

If we [can’t make] 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.

Ralph Benko says he once worked in the Department of Energy. He suggests those light tanks are “cool toys” that DHS is getting cheap, because they are war surplus. Not that he approves. He says it costs way too much, and the government could set an example by ordering maybe one percent of all that ammo, instead of the full amount.

That’s the “kid in the candy store” theory. Even so, it seems incredible that even overgrown kids in a candy store would spend this much money. And surely everyone knows a light tank is not a toy. It’s the kind of thing you buy, either to mount a coup d’état or to stop one.

The linchpin of a coup d’état: gun control

The government is insisting on gun control. That makes the ammo and light tank buys almost conclusive for a coup d’état. When you want to take people’s freedom away, make sure to disarm them first.

And disarmament is the goal. Senator Dianne Feinstein said that eighteen years ago. But more recently, Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) blurted it out to a “citizen journalist.” Feinstein’s pet “assault weapons” bill is only the beginning. Next step: a ban on handguns. How? By writing local “gun-free community” ordinances. She believes that would pass muster in court, in the face of the Second Amendment.

The massive ammo buy might be an indirect way to infringe the right to keep and bear arms. Make ammunition scarce and expensive, and people won’t by it.

But that might be backfiring already. Gun makers everywhere are now refusing to sell to police departments until their respective State governments repeal new anti-gun laws. Olympic Arms was first. LaRue Tactical of Texas joined them. They specifically said they would sell no more than the legal limit in any State to any customer in that State, police or civilian. In other words: no special privileges.

A coup d’état in the planning for a long time?

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Last night, WND published this story headlining DHS buying ammo for 100 years of “training.” But at the bottom, they showed that the federal government has been seeking “police powers” for its agencies for far longer than the Obama administration. This effort even predates the Nine-eleven Incident. The article has a rich supply of links to fifteen years of reports about this. Much of this goes back to the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration did not exactly slow this down. Nor even talk about it. Why not?

Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence) cited many grievances against King George III. One of them: trying to make military power “independent of and superior to” civilian power. Is all this part of that?

All the more reason for Americans not to give up their guns, even if asked.

Related:

• Evidence mounts
• First hints

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