WASHINGTON, D.C.–An innocuous story posted on GunReports.com on August 22 wound up on dozens of websites and YouTube videos last week as hundreds of gunowners publicly worried that the U.S. Government was planning to use 200 million rounds of 40-caliber ammunition to subdue its citizens.
The original GunReports.com story post was headlined, “Winchester to Deliver 200 Million 40-Cal. Rounds to Homeland Security.” Here’s the link.
“We began noticing unusual traffic on the site on Dec. 12,” said GunReports.com’s Sales Manager Gene Taylor. “So I asked content wizard Scott Freigh to track down what was happening.”
Subsequent Google searches led back to a series of 827 re-posts at places as varied as pro-liberty websites to YouTube and Fox News St. Louis. Almost all cited the Winchester story as a worrisome development.
Taylor said the earliest link to the GunReports story was on LiveFreeRadio.net in a Dec. 10 post. The link appeared under the headline ‘Police State News.’
The next day, a YouTube video post for the “Voice of Alex Jones” web-tv program scrolled the GunReports.com page, while the announcer asked, “What do you make of that? What do you guys think of that?”
In the sidebar to the “Jones” video post, this question appeared: “What in the world are they getting ready for?”
Apparently, the Jones viewers worried that the DHS rounds would be used domestically.
“Teotwawki100” wrote under the Jones video: “Clicky-clack. Lock and load, dudes. It’s coming.”
The Jones poster “Britishempires” wrote, “That equals 200 million dead sheep.”
In the GunReports.com comments section, the same worries bubbled up:
“Bigdumbguy” posted, “I can waste as much as 1000 rounds a day just plinking. There may be a plan to actually hire border patrol personnel in the near future, making sure they have ammo stored is not exactly a bad thing. But which way will it be aimed is my question. It’s getting pretty bad here.”
“OPossumTX” had this: “I believe the U.S. government is preparing for an ‘insurgency’ and armed conflict within the borders of the country. Thus all of the mutual aid agreements with other countries and 4 Million Rounds of .40 S&W.”
But poster “mark98115” offered a competing view: “Talk about paranoid. Some people here need to get a grip. First the story specifies maximum of 200 million over the next 5 years. This does not mean 200 per year. It means 6 million per year [sic]. Most likely the government is locking in a price on their purchase of ammo for the next 5 years, but there is not enough detail in the story. If this is like most contracts, then there might be a fixed price for those 5 years or a price structure that allows for only a certain percentage in price increases. … Now get a grip and concentrate on what is the real threat posed by any of these clowns in elected office.”
Taylor said, “Obviously, a lot of patriotic, sincere, conservative people are worried that the federal government’s growing power and arrogance will lead to suppression of their rights–the spree buying earlier this year is another obvious indication of this concern.
“At GunReports.com, we’ll continue to cover developments and give voice to both sides of the story.”
A call Monday to the Department of Homeland Security Public Affairs office in Washington wasn’t immediately returned.
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While GunReports.Com encourages robust discourse that furthers our understanding of all the issues affecting gun owners, comments that break GunReports.Com’s rules will be removed. In addition, we reserve the right to edit or delete individual comments, and in extreme cases, to ban commenters at our discretion.
–Tim Cole
Publisher, GunReports.Com
