Big order by DHS:

The Department of Homeland Security has placed an order for 200 million rounds of pistol ammunition (.40 caliber, hollow-point) over the next five years for use by its Immigration, Customs and Enforcement division.

Let’s see now, ICE has approximately 15,000 employees. Not all of them are licensed to carry firearms, but just to keep the math simple, we’ll divide the whole shebang into 200 million. That works out to a little over 13,000 rounds per employee over five years, or approximately 2,600 per employee per year.

Someone points out that they’d be ordering FMJ if it was for training, but another commenter says that they use hollow points for training, too. Here’s more:

According to my source, who used to be a firearms trainer, each agent must qualify quarterly with his or her Sig P229R .40 caliber pistol. Each qualification requires 120 rounds. 4 x 120 x 10,000 x 5 = 24 million rounds. In addition, each agent is issued a least one 50 round box quarterly for practice. Most use considerably more. So if we conservatively estimate 100 rounds per quarter, we have 4 x 100 x 10,000 x 5 = 20 million rounds. It is not uncommon for conscientious agents to expend 250 to 1000 rounds a quarter in practice. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to expect that ICE would easily use 50 to 100 million rounds (or more) of the Ranger ammunition over five years.

Regardless, big government orders won’t do anything to help alleviate high ammo prices for civilians. But I also don’t mind seeing companies getting nice big government orders, either.

Via Instapundit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under Ammo, Industry News, Law Enforcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.