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(courtesy fbo.gov)

Eagle-eyed TTAG reader TF spotted a link to a U.S. Postal Service Solicitation for Assorted Small Arms Ammunition. It’s actually a pre-solicitation notice; the feds won’t tell applicants (or inquisitive journos) the calibers or amounts until the official solicitation is released. We did learn that the ammo’s for the “standard needs of the Postal Inspection Service and Postal Police.” The main reason that we bring this to your attention: to highlight the recently defeated attempt to strike down the USPS ban on lawful carry within its facilities. You know; by non-law enforcement types. And to report that Senator Paul’s committee did pass legislation that would allow Americans to store their firearms in their cars when visiting the post office. We’ll see if that not-so-small victory makes it into law.

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83 COMMENTS

    • TTAG tries to stay up-to-the-minute with gun news. At the same time, my main man Dan, your 14-posts-a-day mixmaster, shuffles the deck to create a mixed metaphor. I mean, phenomenal farrago of firearms-related news, views and reviews. (I rack ’em, he stacks ’em.)

      Sometimes, newsy posts get pushed forward in time to make way for something a bit more bluesy. Occasionally, a post loses its box-fresh appeal. In some cases, Dan or I go back and refresh the post with new info (e.g. the forthcoming Mexican revolution post). Or kill it. Or let it ride – because the story is interesting enough not to stink up the place.

      So now you know.

        • Actually it wasn’t from drudge, but thanks for assuming. I simply shared a link that was sent to me in an email. I thought it may be of some interest to the community. I apologize all knowing great one, I bow in the shadow of your awesomeness. Maybe next time you can share something of value with a full list of sources and references…….. I simply hit the fwd button after reading the link as it was emailed to me. I can tell you the person I received the email from is a little closer to the source of the link than the dredge report. The link was also emailed to ttag well before the posting as I’m sure it takes them some time to weed through the mail they receive.

      • Heck, TTAG is still faster than the post office.

        The PO has their priorities in order. Flat ass broke and bankrupt but still buying Class V. I wonder if the have 22LR?

    • I carried may for 36 years. They can ship long guns and even handguns. I know, I’ve delivered both. Ammo is another story. I agree. That should be legal as well.

      • But they have to go to an FFL (unless they are antiques)?

        How can the BATF go to a licensed FFL and copy their bound book (which they would NEVER do to create an illegal registry of firearms /sarc off) if they could ship to just anyone?

        The horror of potentially unregulated gunbroker transactions…

        Some might even go to felons, and we know that felons can never access firearms, because the law says they can’t!

    • Neither do Social Security or the Department of Education, unless the DoE is arming guards in schools (which we know they’re not). The government isn’t really trying to hide that they are working on arming every single government employee in preparation for civil war.

      • I worked at various levels of governemnt for over 30 years. Military, federal agencies and local. Give 90% of the none military government employees a rifle and 100 rounds of ammo and they’d have a heart attack trying to climb onto the transport for the battle.

        Besides, I keep seeing these reports of the feds buying up ammo. Where are the corresponding reports on them buying rifles, sidearms, machine guns etc? are the federal forces going to throw bullets at second ghettysburg?

    • My BIL worked several years as a PI. I have no doubt that he needed his gun and his ammo. With that said, the USPS and other agencies probably don’t need a gazillion rounds, but they do employ folks who put their lives on the line on occasion.

  4. Are normal postal workers allow to carry despite the ban or is it because of the “going postal” instances that thats not allowed? IMO they need it more than the people going to the post office. Here in South Florida identity theft is common and a way that crime gets started is by stealing people’s tax returns. A postal worker here was killed last year when some men tried to steal the “master key” to mailboxes on his route. Why is it we arm the people to transport money between banks and ensure we can have the means to spend money on goods but our mailmen have nothing but a boxy cart with the drivers seat on the wrong side?

    • I did the job for 36 years and went into neighborhoods alone and armed only with a can of dog spray where the cops went in pairs armed to the teeth with a radio to call for help. Luckily, I never had a serious problem.

    • Are normal postal workers allow to carry despite the ban or is it because of the “going postal” instances that thats not allowed?

      Well, I don’t know that I’m normal by any conventional definition…but in any case, for typical postal workers no way, no how. In my 30 years with the USPS, going to work armed has never been an option.

    • That was a joke. But really. Any thug with a 32 could hold a mail truck up. Try that with a brinks truck and the driver will laugh at you from the safety of his armored drivers seat when the round ricochets off the window and into your leg.

      • Which is why we have something known as the “shaped charge”. Or the “bigger truck to knock over smaller truck”. The assailant’s real problem in the Brink’s heist scenario is being able to get in and out of there before a response arrives.

        Hey, anybody on here ever hear of something called “Electronic CounterMeasures”?

        There’s no such thing as an impenetrable target.

        • In my admittedly limited experience, people who can afford shaped charges generally don’t use them to rob people. They use the tax code for that.

        • Good point.

          “Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
          I’ve seen lots of funny men
          Some will rob you with a six-gun
          And some with a fountain pen.”

          Woody Guthrie, PRETTY BOY FLOYD

        • “In my admittedly limited experience, people who can afford shaped charges generally don’t use them to rob people.”

          You could make a crude “shaped charge” with some formable explosive compound, a protractor, and a metal pie pan. Heck, Iran was turning these things out in very sophisticated job lots during the Iraq war and they don’t have the most refined industrial base.

        • Easier than you might think, but harder, too. There’s a reason a good bombmaker is a highly prized asset for a terrorist organization- the bad ones tend to blow themselves up a lot.

          Iran and Iraq may not have the most diversified manufacturing sector, but they do have a gigantic amount of military grade/military sourced (Soviet) munitions available when compared to the US domestic market. The casing isn’t the difficult part, it’s the explosive and the detonator/trigger mechanism.

          If you have military or even industrial blasting caps, and some kind of C4 equivalent, then yes, you can make a shaped charge. I’m sure it’s even possible to make such things with materials found in stores. The knowledge of how to do so? Not so easy to find. Personally, I have no idea how it’s done.

          Iran was trying to fight a proxy war against the US and the so-called Iraqi government, to improve their chances of controlling the region after we inevitably went home. Sure, the EFP weapons they shipped in were emplaced by scattered insurgent groups, but it’s a far cry from someone trying to knock over an armored car for some bags of cash. Sure, it doesn’t exactly fit my ‘tax code’ statement, but it’s still a bigger game they were playing over there.

  6. Why don’t they go to WalMart? Far cheaper and they could pick up some midal and exlax for their “other” problems.

        • Got that right. Talked to a couple of my local hard rice dealers and they said people are going nuts over .22lr, coming in to order case lots through them cause they don’t trust ordering online becuz the gubment blahblahblah. The ammo shortages in US are consumer driven, thanks to America’s top weapon and ammo salesman Barrack Hussein Obama. The only thing in our economy he has not f*cked up.

        • William, the G isn’t buying .22LR. .22 ammo is in short supply because the ammo manufacturers aren’t going to be spending a lot of machine time on low margin stuff when they can run high margin ammo and sell every round they make, and at good prices.

          If GM was selling every Cadillac Escalade it could make, it wouldn’t be making a lot of Chevy Aveos. Every line would be making Caddys.

        • Ralph, Though I’m loathe to correct you, I would just offer that to some extent the production of “big v. small” is driven by CAFE regs.

        • Ralph,

          You do realize that .22 LR is made on completely different equipment than other ammo. So you’re “spending less machine time” theory is bunk.

    • TTAG Reader Challenge: find an arrest made by the Postal Police that warranted taking the pistol out of the holster.

      There’s 650 Postal Police, which is about 13 policemen per state. Presumably the PP aren’t evenly distributed throughout the 50 states. So it doesn’t seem like they SWAT a lot of people.

      • SWAT or not, woe be upon those who screw with Postal Inspectors. They have more obscure Federal minutiae at their fingertips than most can fathom.

        Seriously, they (at least the few I’ve met) are whiz-kids and they know all the rules you’ve broken.

        • One reason we use postal money orders to pay bills is that when some idiot calls and claims it was not paid we just whip out the receipt and tell them not to worry, I’ll just call the Post Master General’s hotline, suddenly they find their “mistake” and the problem disappears. Or, legitimately it did not make it there and USPS issues another one, no quibbles. Try that with a bank.

        • It’s like being President and having the IRS on your speed dial. “Mail Fraud”? That’s up there with tax evasion on ways to get put away for 10-20. I too use USPS money orders for things when I want an issuer who not only will answer the phone, but will send in the dogs if things go sideways.

      • I’ve only seen the postal police a couple of times at the main PO during many frequent visits over several years. There aren’t very many of them from what I have seen.

        • My impression is that that’s correct. I spoke with postal inspectors by phone a couple times when I lived in Taos, which has a postal service in incredibly bad (and criminal) that they would make the most backwater African post office look like champs.

          They took a while to call me up after I filled out the online complaint form, and my impression is that there are few of them, and that they’re very, very busy guys.

        • You’re right, any decent metro would dwarf them – there’s about 1500 Special Agents in the field, with about the same number of supervisors(!?!). There’s another 4K or so doing the other general stuff and clerical and whatnot.

          I know a couple in passing and I would never want to be in their crosshairs. They won’t no-knock you at 3am and end it all (one way or another) quickly. They will relentlessly and deliberately disassemble and confiscate anything and everything you value. Then put you in a Fed Pen.

  10. I can only think this is to make sure every tentacle of the Federal Gubmint is armed to the teeth for the take over. Further, this is for when the rally call comes from King Joffe Joffer Obama of Zamunda to burn the Constitution in Freedom Hall Philadelphia PA, trample and take the weapons of the infidels and instate martial law. God help us.

  11. First the Postal Service buys all the ammo that’s left after DHS picked the supply clean, then somebody burns the Winchester ammo plant in East Alton. Coincidence?

    • Was scheduled to close in the rather near future anyway, as those damned union types thought they should make a close-to-middle-class-living making ammo.

      I’d suspect the company as much as the other bad actors. They are dead set on moving to Mississippi where the pathetic locals are desperate enough to work for Moon Pies and RC.

      Enjoy the race to the bottom!

      • So what do you think the “correct” wage for semiskill automated production line work is? vs what a union “lifestyle to which we’ve become acustomed” in a Marxist cesspool thinks wage should be?

        • “Correct”? How about something north of minimum wage with almost no benes which is what they pay the desperate dirt farmers in Mississippi? Not only were the Alton workers not looking for more, they would have been ok to stay the same, despite Olin’s profits. Instead, Olin wanted to turn Alton into the just-this-side-of-third-world that MS is. (You should go visit that Randian paradise, save for a few blocks of major metros it’s like East St Louis everywhere. But they accept their lot…)

          You know what you get for minimum wage? Minimum qualification, minimum brains, minimum education (MS, that’s a given), more importantly minimum positive impact for the economy. Factory work is mind-numbing, hard on your body, and soul-crushing for anyone who isn’t geared for it. There’s no reason not to pay them the pathetically average wage and benes they were getting, just to save money by moving to the land the impoverished.

          Don’t worry, China’s even cheaper and someday those poor rubes will be out of a job too because there’s an even more desperate dupe there who will work for a week there. But I’m sure we can remain a superpower shipping all our money out of the country, right? 40+ years straight of negative trade balances mean nothing. Shipping the majority of our low-mid skill labor away is a good thing right? I’m sure we can just retrain them to be doctors, chemists, physicists, and math researchers, the only job openings we truly have right now…

  12. I know the USPS has a tactical team for raids on people shipping illegal things like drugs. Ammo buying would most likely be for these teams.

    • Name it and they will get one. Need more places to stockpile stuff, now that the Army is back from the Stan and all the Nat Guard Armories are full up…

      Keep those rounds out of the hands of civilans at any cost!!!

      How much you want to bet DiFi’s husband gets the contract?

  15. Federal (GSA) agencies have been disposing of (transferring to ____) very large quantities of handguns (mostly 9mm, .40, and some 357Sig) and M16 for some time. Every screwball alphabet soup agency you can name. And there is no way they are not preplacing these with new firearms. I’ve only been watching this for about a year but makes a cynic think.

    All surplus Fed property is listed at http://www.gsaxcess.gov for reutilization by other Fed and local gov’t agencies. A different system from the LESO program where the local cops are getting their MRAPS and HMMWV etc from DOD.

    • The way surplusing works is first the owning agency sees if it can transfer the material within the agency. If there is no need, then the other Federal agencies are notified of availability (which is how we got really cheap safes). If there are no takers, then non-Federal entities (like large police departments and the Boy/Girl Scouts) are queried. What’s left after the bones are picked clean is offered by auction to the Public. It’s usually junk.

      • Bill The point is that the Feds are not just buying up massive qty of ammo but are rearming in a massive way.

        The are HUGE quanities of DOD surplus in VERY good to unused condition available at present that make it thru to the public auction (www.govliquidation.com) as Obumer disarms the MILITARY.

  18. Why does the postal service need their own police force?
    They justify such by stating it’s for the protection of the postal inspectors.
    In a 105 year period from 1909 to present fourteen postal works have died in the line of duty. That equates to one death every 7.5 years.
    https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/fallenofficers.aspx

    How long will it be before the postal service has it’s own SWAT teams complete with MRAPs?
    Many other alphabet agencies have their own SWAT teams from the IRS to the Social Security Agency. Why does the SSA need SWAT teams?

    • The IRS does not have a SWAT team! It has a criminal investigation division, which is 95 years old. It has approx 2500 special agents nationwide. They are the one’s who did Al Capone and many other gangsters, crooked politicians and other criminals. All the ID theft you read about in the news in tax fraud and these Federal LEOS are the ones working these cases and putting these gangbangers and hood rats in prison. Most of these ID thiefs are gang members/ drug dealers who moved away from dope to the easy money. Yes, these IRS federal agents are armed, but no SWAT teams. Most of you “civilian sheepdogs” wouldn’t do this job, or any other law enforcement job, for twice the pay. Stop reading infowars and get some education,

    • In my opinion – and it’s not much more than my opinion – DHS is repositing them with as many other federal agencies as they can, so it will not appear (as much) as if they are gearing up for attacks on American citizens.

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