If Ammo Seems Scarce..

It may be because the government is buying it all up.

An approximation of how many rounds of ammunition the DHS has now secured over the last 10 months stands at around 1.625 billion. In March 2012, ATK announced that they had agreed to provide the DHS with a maximum of 450 million bullets over four years, a story that prompted questions about why the feds were buying ammunition in such large quantities. In September last year, the federal agency purchased a further 200 million bullets.

To put that in perspective, during the height of active battle operations in Iraq, US soldiers used 5.5 million rounds of ammunition a month. Extrapolating the figures, the DHS has purchased enough bullets over the last 10 months to wage a full scale war for almost 30 years.

Seems like an awful lot of ammo, even given the amount of practice government agents always seem to have missed out on.

The thing that got my attention however, was the note that part of the ammo contract, 200,000 rounds, went to a company that was incorporated just 5 days before receiving the award. Almost as though there was some kind of inside deal in place. Seeing that the outfit was located in Las Vegas sent up another red flag. The question there is not weather some shady characters might be involved, but rather which shady characters. Even better, the price of $45,000 comes to about 1/2 the going retail rate. Bulk discounts notwithstanding, if I had 200K rounds sitting around at a time when the stuff had a street value of $90,000, I don't think I'd sell it to the government unless I was looking to get it out of my warehouse in a hurry, no questions asked.

The company in question, Evian Group, has a Las Vegas address currently occupied by a bodega and a Las Paisanos bus stop.

It's enough to make me wonder if the ammo was originally shipped to Vegas in boxes marked Propiedad de la Armada de México (Property of the Mexican Army).