After grabbing legal power, bureaucrats are amassing firepower. It’s time to scale back the federal arsenal.
Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees?
The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.
What exactly is the Obama administration up to?
On Friday, June 17, our organization, American Transparency, is releasing its OpenTheBooks.com oversight report on the militarization of America. The report catalogs federal purchases of guns, ammunition and military-style equipment by seemingly bureaucratic federal agencies. During a nine-year period through 2014, we found, 67 agencies unaffiliated with the Department of Defense spent $1.48 billion on guns and ammo. Of that total, $335.1 million was spent by agencies traditionally viewed as regulatory or administrative, such as the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Mint.
Some examples of spending from 2005 through 2014 raise the question: Who are they preparing to battle?
• The Internal Revenue Service, which has 2,316 special agents, spent nearly $11 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. That’s nearly $5,000 in gear for each agent…
Somebody is gearing up for a war – or an Apocalypse. I am convinced this is a measure of how bad the coming collapse looks to be to the eggheads in the know. Much of this is probably intended for the inner cities, which will rapidly descend into Lord of the Flies style anarchy once the shit hits the fan and the EBT cards fail. I suspect that they think it will be like the fall of Hanoi – some rabbits will make it to the designated LZ’s for their armed extractions by the skin of their teeth, and many will not – and they will never be heard from again.
The thing is you can see the army – you don’t see the spooks who support it. From their identities, to their operations, to their budgets – it is all kept out of sight. I will bet for every dollar spent on guns and ammo for the as-hoc domestic army of bureaucrats and desk jockeys that Obama is assembling, a hundred dollars have been spent on domestic covert intel networks.
It is everywhere, and it is watching you, if you are conservative and pro-gun. No matter what happens, and no matter how your amygdala lights up as the chaos unfolds, don’t do anything stupid or crazy until you know what is keeping tabs on you and how.
[…] Government Arming Up Openly – But What Aren’t We Seeing? […]
Matthew Bracken, please pick up the white courtesy phone… Am reading the first book in his “Enemies” trilogy, and the basic plot is so believable it hurts.
Off topic: If Brexit wins and Trump wins, what do we have? To me, two countries who woke up too late.
All of these are playing according to cues in evolved mechanisms, and as such, I think they will be perfectly timed more often than not. Let it happen too early, and not enough will be wrong to produce what is needed.
We’ll be fine in the end, I suspect, not least of which is all the right people own the firearms.