Department of Homeland Security Investigating Large Ammunition Purchases
March 23rd, 2009Via: Post Star:
Everyone interviewed by The Post-Star for this story agreed ammunition of all calibers has gotten tougher to find, as gun owners stock up. Prices skyrocketed in recent years as metal prices went up, which caused many gun owners to stock up in anticipation of rising ammunition prices.
There are also concerns that some larger calibers, or those used by military-type weapons, could be banned, restricted or taxed more heavily.
One northern Warren County resident found out recently the government is paying attention to such ammunition sales.
West said a customer of his recently stocked up on .223-caliber rounds, a caliber often used in assault-style weapons. The customer bought 1,000 rounds a few months ago through a mail order company.
Shortly after the purchase, he received a visit from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, whose interest was apparently piqued by a large-scale purchase of that caliber.
“His wife was home. He was at church,” West said.
DHS is going to have a lot of doors to knock on if they’re checking up on anyone who’s bought a thousand rounds of .223 Remington, .308 Winchester, or 7.62x39mm Soviet.
Even if it’s just tracking down online or mail orders, DHS would need cooperation from places like Midway USA or Cheaper Than Dirt or Ammoman. Which, if word got around, could cost those merchants a lot of business. Makes me wonder what’s going on with this one throw-away sentence:
Shortly after the purchase, he received a visit from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, whose interest was apparently piqued by a large-scale purchase of that caliber.
Personally, I’d be a lot more worried about bulk orders of .338 Lapua or .50 BMG, since you need expensive guns and a substantial amount of training to use them properly, but who knows.
Even if it’s just tracking down online or mail orders, DHS would need cooperation from…
Why would they need cooperation from the retailers if they have the websession and the financial transaction information? (see: Narus Intercept Suite.)
It doesn’t matter anyway.
People aren’t complete idiots. They’re obviously deciding to draw the line. Where that is will vary from individual to individual. Whatever pigs/feds are going to cross that line can take a lesson from what happened in Oakland yesterday. One shooter: 4 dead cops.
“But they’re not desperate enough.”
Just wait.
Enough armed, broke, hungry people run up against the state’s insane whims… and you’ve got a serious fucking problem. This has all happened before. Over and over again.
MANY more people assume they’re on “the list” than probably are, and they’re arming themselves to the tits. But their fears will be made real as .gov continues to act stupidly.
“I have nothing to lose,” will be on the lips of more and more people.
Interestingly, the loose unit factor on various public threads has never been higher in the 14 years that I’ve been using the Internet. For every dumbass bubba/fed who dares .gov to fuck with him, how many millions of people are quietly sitting at home, with black rifles and full magazines???
.gov will need a stunner to try to turn the tide on this trend.
But if HR 45 passes, that’s it. The fuse will be lit.
Let’s assume that the Narus gear is really all that and a bag of chips, and not just another way for infosec procurement to spend millions of Federal Reserve Notes on boondoggle-ware and maybe get some blowjobs out of the deal, and that it’s not a fantastic bit of disinfo thrown out for semi-public consumption. It would still take a large amount of cooperation for the different gov’t agencies involved to extract, collate and hand off the data, resulting in some poor GS-9 “field agent” going around and actually knocking on people’s doors. I’m not saying this doesn’t, or wouldn’t happen, but that it is likely not a seamless end-to-end polished process. I’d argue that in many cases, LEOs are more likely to go back to the simpler call-a-buddy-who-works-somewhere approach or lean on merchants to get specific bits of info. Especially if it means not having to go to another agency for that info.
And the whole knocking on doors bit is rather silly. You wouldn’t really want to do that in the scenario where you already have the home/billing/shipping address, credit card number, financial and employment history of the person in question. Why bother? Makes me wonder why any .gov would try to do that.
And what if the ultimate goal here is to foment civil unrest? Turn up the agitation against gun owners, publicize some deliberately provocative actions by apparently idiotic Feds. Combine that with some widespread structural collapse, and then you can let the “consumers” kill each other off as they scramble for food, water, guns and ammo.
“Interestingly, the loose unit factor on various public threads has never been higher in the 14 years that I’ve been using the Internet.”
I totally agree with Kevin on this statement. I’ve been on the net since you had to type to use it and there is more weird noise about antigov/cold dead hands than I have ever seen before (excepting maybe between Waco and OK City). I’m not sure if its just a “natural” phenomenon or something created. Glenn Beck talking about Fema Camps and “The Bubba Effect” really leaves me scratching my head. It could be nothing, or it could be that a frame is being built within which a story will be told.
Regarding the original post, I’m skeptical. This sounds like some guy at a brick and mortar store telling a cautionary tale about buying ammo off the internet (as opposed to paying sweet, untraceable cash at a traditional gun shop).