“It also breaks out to 50 Rds per month of training...”
For the Fisheries Department???
They shoulda’ sent one of their guys up to Boston instead!
OTOH, I work near a nuke facility every once in awhile. They have a shooting range for their security teams. Every morning they burn through thousands of rounds an hour from the sounds of it. (Semi-auto and auto). It always gives me pause when one of them comes out of their truck to see what I’m up to and they already have their rifle in hand as they are climbing out.
Parks and Recreation may not seem like a branch that needs to be armed but our national parks have unfortunately become home to drug dealers growing pot and other drug producing cash crops on public lands.
In reality, Parks and Recreation field officers are some of the LEOs most likely to get into a serious fire fight with hard core bad guys in very remote locations with little or no back up. Think Mexican Mafia, Sinaloa Cowboys, Aryan Nation and even the Crips and Bloods doing the Green Acres thing.
More than a few Park Rangers have been killed in the line of duty by illegal drug growers in recent years.
If you are carrying a gun as a duty weapon maintaining proficiency is part of the job.
If you are not proficient you have no business carrying a weapon as part of your job description.
Shooting 50 rds per month is not a lot for maintaining proficiency. More like a bare bones minimum.
That works out to shooting two and half , maybe three depending on the gun, full magazines of ammo a month. It also works out to one box of pistol ammo per month if you want to look at it for that perspective.
On the other hand, I have been skeptical about the rumors of excessive DHS ammo purchases .
That was until I saw the historical ammp purchase history charts from DHS.
I was wrong and there is cause for legitimate concern.
Ever since Obama took office and put Janet Napolitano in charge of DHS, ammo purchases have doubled or tripled over the purchase volume under the Bush Administration at a time when we are being told that the war on terror is winding down and DHS ammo requirements should be going down not up.
Not a good sign from a group of DHS anti terror enforcement officers who seem consider and are trying to re define as “Terrorist” “right wing, homophobic and racist Christians” and pretty much anyone who disagrees with them or opposes their agenda in any way shape or form.
Somebody at DHS has some explaining to do on that one, but lets not reflexively have a paranoid, knee jerk reaction to every ammo purchase because it really plays into the hands of people who wish to ridicule those with legitimate concerns about the huge spike in DHS ammo buying.