Democrats and the NRA have found something they agree on: the government isn't stockpiling ammo.
Oklahoma Republicans Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas think the Obama administration is buying too much ammunition in an attempt to limit the amount available to the public.
Inhofe and Lucas each introduced a bill on Friday that would prohibit the government—except for the military—from buying more ammo each month than the monthly average each agency bought from 2001-2009, the Bush years.
“President Obama has been adamant about curbing law-abiding Americans’ access and opportunities to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” said Inhofe.” One way the Obama Administration is able to do this is by limiting what’s available in the market with federal agencies purchasing unnecessary stockpiles of ammunition.”
But even NRA says the theory doesn’t hold water.
“Skepticism of government is healthy. But today, there are more than enough actual threats to the Second Amendment to keep gun owners busy…there is no need to invent additional threats to our rights,” the group wrote in a release when the theories circulated last summer.
During a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the bill last Thursday, Republicans complained of the large stores of ammo the Department of Homeland Security had collected over the years. (In the 2012 fiscal year, DHS bought 103 million bullets; 80% of ammunition purchases are used for training, according to the DHS.)
Rep. John Tierney, a Democrat from Massachusetts on the subcommittee, criticized the hearing, which he said was based on blogger theories: “To the extent that we’re responding to conspiracy theories, I think we’re really wasting everybody’s time on that,” he said.
