Earlier this month, infowars.com commentator Mossberg500 (no bias there) was not happy to hear that the U.S. Department of Education was buying 27 shotguns. “Their first mistake was purchasing Remington shotguns when they could have gotten the Mossberg Persuader tactical pumps. (IDIOTS) I think they meant ‘No child left alive’ with their ass-bag mentality . . . If they think for one minute they are going to enforce federally mandated educational laws on my kids with Remington firearms, boy are they in for a surprise.” And now that the media furor has subsided, I thought it an ideal time to call The Office of the Inspector General (DOE division). I asked spinmeister Catherine Grant if I could interview one of their shotgun-toting enforcement agents. As Mandark would say, ha! HA ha ha ha. But she did sit down and shoot me an email (so to speak) making the case for gun-toting DOECIs. (If they go hunting and shoot a deer, is that a DOECI DOE?) Here’s her six-point defense of the dark art of armed agents.

(1) OIG employs approximately 100 special agents who work in states across the country. Click on this link for a list of our locations: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/oigaddress.html

(2) All of our agents are issued a Glock handgun (Glock 22, Glock 23, or Glock 27 depending on agent’s preference.)

(3) When conducting high risk law enforcement activity, they carry the Remington 870 shotguns. High risk law enforcement activities include making arrests, conducting search warrants, surveillance, undercover operations.  Warrants sometimes involve multiple subjects with a history of violence (homicides, serious assaults), weapons possession, gang members, and individuals with ties to organized crime.  For example:

*    In 2008, the work of OIG special agents in a case involving a man who had stolen the identities of others to fraudulently obtain Federal student aid funds found the man to be an escaped murderer who had been sentenced to 27 years in prison for murder and other crimes in Puerto Rico.

*    In 2004, a man with suspected ties to a Russian organized crime syndicate was sentenced as a result of an OIG investigation into the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal student aid involving a proprietary school he owned and another school with which he had connections.  This investigation found that the man also stole more than a million dollars from other Federal programs.

*    In 2004, OIG efforts led to the unraveling of a scheme involving members of a gang involved in drugs, extortion, arson, and racketeering who had stolen Federal education funds from a charter school in Philadelphia they operated as well as the Community College of Philadelphia.

(4) For more information on our investigative cases, please click on this link: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/ireports.html

(5) For more information on the history of the OIGs, please click on this link: www.ignet.gov

(6) For more information on the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, please click on this link: http://www.fletc.gov/

And you can click here for a full list of TTAG’s DOE shotgun coverage

We asked. They answered.

The Office of Inspector General is the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Department of Education and is responsible for the detection of waste, fraud, abuse, and other criminal activity involving Federal education funds, programs, and operations. As such, OIG operates with full statutory law enforcement authority, which includes conducting search warrants, making arrests, and carrying firearms. The acquisition of these firearms is necessary to replace older and mechanically malfunctioning firearms, and in compliance with Federal procurement requirements. For more information on OIG’s law enforcement authority, please visit our Web site at: www.ed.gov/oig. The information is available on the front page of our site.

Thank you again for your inquiry.

Catherine Grant
Public Affairs Liaison
U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General

So then we asked again: which guns, what malfunctions?