Gun Owners of America spokesman Mike Hammond told the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow today that federal agencies are buying weapons because “the federal government is anticipating and preparing for confrontation with American citizens.”
Hammond was responding to a Brietbart report that the Department of Agriculture was soliciting for a contract for submachine guns. The story is similar to the undying conspiracy theory that the Department of Homeland Security solicited a stockpile of ammunition for nefarious ends . Hammond’s boss, Larry Pratt, speculated to extremist radio host Pete Santilli that the routine purchase was in fact part of President Obama’s plot to build a private army to overpower the U.S. military.
A Second Amendment advocate has a theory about why the U.S. Department of Agriculture is buying body armor and submachine guns.
Mike Hammond, legislative council to Gun Owners of America, says it follows a pattern of other federal agencies that seem to be preparing for war – against us.
“We suspect that the federal government is anticipating and preparing for confrontation with American citizens,” he says, wondering aloud if President Obama is preparing for a dictatorship.
“What are the characteristics of a dictatorship?” Hammond asks rhetorically. “An individual who is bound not by the law, but by his own desires and his own goals. And that may be where we are now.”
In an online story with more than 6,000 comments, Breitbart.com reported that the USDA put in a solicitation for lightweight submachine guns on May 7.
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Still, Hammond wonders if the USDA closely watched the Cliven Bundy confrontation, when armed American citizens faced off against Bureau of Land Management agents in Nevada in past weeks.
The Department of Agriculture, like many federal agencies, has an investigative and law enforcement division. Agents of the DOA’s investigative division have since 1981 [pdf] had the authority to “conduct investigations of significant criminal activities involving USDA programs, operations, and personnel, and are authorized to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry firearms.”
These law enforcement divisions – which can be the subject of an honest debate that GOA is clearly not interested in having – have been growing steadily since the 1970s, long before Obama was president.
