AP misses target in blame for police ammo shortage
An Associated Press report published late Friday afternoon stated that ammunition shortages in some law enforcement agencies around the nation were to be blamed on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....There is much more.
...To understand the ammunition shortage being experienced by some police agencies today, we shouldn't look at September 11, 2001, but instead, begin with February 28, 1997.
It was on that day in North Hollywood, California that Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, two-heavily armed and armored bank robbers, engaged in a 44-minute shootout with an out-gunned Los Angeles Police Department. The two suspects fired more than 1,300 rounds of ammunition, and each was shot multiple times with police handguns. The 9mm police pistol bullets bounced off their homemade body armor. Phillips eventually died after being shot 11 times; Matasareanu died after being hit 29 times.
In the aftermath of the shootout, the LAPD, followed by police departments large and small nationwide, began to feel that rank-and-file patrol officers should be armed with semi-automatic or fully-automatic assault rifles or submachine guns in addition to their traditional sidearms, anticipating an up-tick of heavily armed and armored subjects. The trend has failed to materialize more than a decade later.
As with most trends in law enforcement, the trend towards the militarization of police patrol officers to a level once reserved for SWAT/ERT teams was slow, though one that gathered momentum rapidly after September 11, 2001.
Today, it is this increased and on-going militarization of police forces and the associated training requirements that have caused the ammunition shortages experienced by some police departments, and the lack of ammunition is not related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in any meaningful way.
The Associated Press report is not supported beyond anecdotal evidence by real, objective facts.
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According to two spokesmen for the world's largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military's ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.
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Bob Owens does the job AP was too lazy to do. He goes to the source of the ammo and finds a very different reason for any ammo shortages. I think the story does indicate the problem you can have with limited suppliers and a lack of competition. Neither the Afghan or Iraq war are engaged in heavy kinetic operations at this time so the amount of ammo actually used is probably significantly less than it was a few years ago. That should have been the first clue to the AP writers that they were on the wrong track.
Another interesting question is, who is supplying ammo to the Mexican insurgents who are using some of the same weapons as the swat teams?
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