March 21, 2008
Quartermasters with the Baltimore County Police Department became aware of a higher demand on ammunition as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and planned accordingly.Bill Toohey with the department says their supplier was giving the priority to military ammo and it was difficult to get "day to day" bullets.
Toohey says as a result they switched suppliers who is not so dependent on military contracts. He says they also purchased a nine month supply of bullets instead of the usual six month supply. "At the moment we have more than enough to get us through so if there is a problem we have some pad to fall back on," says Toohey.
The Sheriff in Washington County and police chief in Hagerstown say in addition to have a shortage of ammo for their agencies they are also paying more for bullets.
Toohey says the cost of bullets has also gone up in Baltimore County. He tells WBAL Radio that they were spending $209 dollars per one-thousand bullets that the officer's use now the county pays $278 per thousand. "But again they saw this coming and built it into the budget," says Toohey.
The problem with this story? It is unequivocally false, as was the original Associated Press article that first made a similar claim last summer.
If Wikipedia is correct, the BCPD uses the Sigarms SIG Pro 2340 as their primary sidearm, a firearm that does not use the 9mm NATO pistol cartridge used by our military. It is therefore false to claim that that any ammunition shortage of this caliber of bullets is due to military usage.
The same Wikipedia entry notes that for backing up the SIG Pro, the Remington 870 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun plays a secondary role. 12 gauge-shotguns, while used by the military for specific roles (typically door-beaching, CQB, and guarding prisoners), is used in far fewer numbers than the M16/M4 weapons systems. Claiming that a war-related shortage of ammunition affects the BCPD shotguns is also false.
The only possible firearm cartridge used by the BCPD that could conceivably be impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the .223 or 5.56x45 NATO round used by the relatively few BCPD officers issued M16 or M4-type firearms.
But this claim is also untrue.
As I noted in great detail on my post of August 20, 2007, the ammunition factories and production lines that supply our military are completely separate from the ammunition factories and production lines that supply ammunition to police and the general public.
After speaking with spokesmen from three of the largest ammunition manufacturers in the United States, it became clear that the primary cause of the shortage of ammunition for police departments was the direct result of increased consumption by police departments.
Police departments (and civilians) are purchasing more .223 Remington/5.56-caliber firearms, particularly military-style carbines.
Once purchased, police officers much train to acquire and maintain their proficiency with these weapons, and it is the increased consumption of ammunition by police that is most directly responsible for their own ammunition shortages, as manufacturers we unable to catch up with increased police demand.
Another cause of the shortage is increased demand in developing nations for raw materials used in cartridge manufacturing, particularly brass and lead.
What... you think that China was able to produce all the lead for their toy industry internally? No, they purchase those materials on the global market, including the United States, which drives up raw material prices.
Sadly, though Jeff Quinton addressed the factual inaccuracies of the story yesterday morning, and I contacted both the BCPD and WBAL's newsroom shortly afterward to retract their false story (after providing them with the names of contacts of the three largest military and civilian ammunition manufacturers, Brian Grace of ATK Corporate Communications, Michael Shovel, National Sales Manager for CORBON/Glaser, and Michael Haugen, Manager of the Military Products Division for Remington Arms Company Inc), the news outlet seems less than interested in discovering the facts than in pushing a poorly-sourced story that relies on police quartermasters, men in no position to have direct knowledge of why demand has risen.
WBAL's newsroom seems far more interested in taking the lazy way out than practicing professional journalism. If you would like to ask WBAL to retract this demonstrably false story, you can contact them here.
Be polite, and perhaps we can make sure they stay on target in the future.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
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