Tigerstripe said:
first i dont think many "per sworn federal LEO" actually train and dont qualify on a sceduale if they can get by without it. ive heard of cops that cant qualify but they are still cops. and they arent going to train. some people they are counting may not even carry.
There's a big difference between a local cop and the FBI Hostage Rescue team or an Air Marshal.
I'm not aware of any federal LE agency that does not routinely qualify. Again, podunk small town cops may skip such formalities. Large bureaucracies do not. I'm not saying that the quals are hard or require expert skill, but they will chew through ammo. For example, a basic FBI agent requires 50 rounds to qualify once per year. At the qualification event, another 50-100 rounds will likely be used for practice. That is a minimum of 100 rounds for that single event. Additionally, if the agent has a long gun then qualification will be required on that weapons system as well -- another 100+ rounds. Other agencies have stricter requirements. For example, Border Patrol qualifies quarterly.
Even the military -- which has LOW standards for weapons handling, especially handguns -- will not issue a weapon to someone who is not currently qualified with their paperwork in order. This is certainly true for paramilitary organizations like the US Coast Guard (falls under DHS, part of the ammo buys).
No risk averse bureaucratic manager, whether a military commander or a civilian LEO leader, wants to assume the career risk of letting an "unqualified" person walk around with a weapon. If that unqualified person has a negligent discharge or a bad deadly force incident then there will be huge scrutiny on the manager that allowed the situation to occur.
As for proficiency fire, anyone who has taken a two day carbine or handgun course knows that the round counts are easily in the hundreds. The NRA Law Enforcement handgun and carbine courses have a 1200 round count requirement. The NRA LE tactical shooting course requires 1650 rounds.
It is not unreasonable to think that an annual training regimen for a sworn federal LE agent to consist of annual qualification fire, some sort of handgun or carbine class, and at least quarterly or semiannual range days where a few boxes of ammo will be gone through. ICE agents are allocated 1000 rounds a year... If you divide out the Border Patrol annual ammo buy it is about 500 rounds per agent for training and another approximately 250 for operations (consider a "patrol carbine" load is 7x30 rd rifle mags and 3x15 rd pistol mags and that's just about right). Honestly, those round counts seem LOW to me.
I bet there are
large numbers of people on this board that go through >1K rounds per year. If you put one or two boxes of pistol ammo through your CCW every month or two, play a few skeet rounds over the summer, take a single shooting class, and plink with a carbine over the course of a year you probably use up more ammo than an ICE agent or Border Patrol guy gets.
Tigerstripe said:
next, when i did gobment work :lol: :lol: :lol: , well it was, i heard that if the department head scrimped by and didnt use all his alloted funds, they became his bonus for the year. right, there is no giving money back because its only numbers on paper unless it is put on a check, to someone.
I hope you called the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse hotline. Seriously, government budgets are not issued in bags of cash to a department head. There are expense accounts using easily tracked debit-style cards, and almost everything has to go to an approved sourcing contractor (to steer business to companies owned by veterans, disabled people, small business, etc). It can literally takes DAYS of effort (hrm... how much does a gov't employee cost per day?) to get approval to buy from a non-pre approved vendor.
I have NEVER heard of a government manager getting a bonus for not using allotted funds. The typical process is to reduce the next year's department budget to what was actually spent (as clearly all that money wasn't "needed"). There is a lot of wasteful spending on toner, big screen TVs, etc at the end of the fiscal year but it isn't like the branch chief gets a big Publisher's Clearing House style check.
Tigerstripe said:
something is up and stinky.
Sen Tom Coburn -- a very strong 2A advocate and a hawk on wasteful government spending -- found that DHS ammo purchases are not unusual in any way. This whole thing seems like a manufactured crisis.
There are lots of other things worth thinking about with this issue. For example, why are some of these agencies exclusively training with JHP instead of using more FMJ? Why are we not investing in some .22 LR trainers and making more use of laser training and simunitions as cost saving measures? Those are ways to trim expenses without negatively impacting training or operations too much. I am NOT concerned in the least about CBP buying 500 rounds per agent per year.
I'll get worried when I see the DHS MRAPs mounting belt fed medium or heavy machine guns, or when DHS starts getting AGM-114 Hellfires for their MQ-1s. :lol:
