A Week Later, the Lie’s Still Traveling

It’s been said, by Terry Pratchett and many others, that a lie can get all the way around the world before the truth ever gets its boots on. You can get a good look at that truism in action today, as the Washington Post serves us some week-old gruel polished up to make it look like Iraq and Afghanistan are hurting our police departments and making us less safe here at home.

The story first broke about a week ago that police departments all across America are having trouble getting ammunition. They either can’t get enough of the ammo they need to do their range qualifications or the ammo they order is taking much longer to arrive than it should, forcing them to delay the qualifications. I first saw it on August 17 in the Associated Press (via Ace, and other places), which flatly said that the number one reason this was so was our military’s presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

George Bush, y’see, is hurting our police officers. The AP then goes on to cite a list of departments specifically impacted by the shortage: Milwaukee, Trenton, Fort Smith, Phoenix. Not to be outdone, local news outlets put local faces on the story for their home audiences and each story laid the same blame right up at the top: Iraq and Afghanistan are shorting our police of necessary equipment.

The problem is that every one of these stories is flat-out wrong.

The Seattle Times chimed in about in King County, WA as well as Everett. They went so far as to contact an really big ammunition manufacturer in Missouri (as we’ll see later, they got really close to the real reason for the shortage, but missed the mark).

The reason in Asheville, NC is “wartime demands” and, if you happen to read about five paragraphs in, “a shortage of raw materials”. Hmmm…so it’s not just our military?

The department in Lodi, CA is short, though the CHiPs and San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department is AOK. The reporter didn’t even mention why there might be a shortage here.

It’s getting bad in Durango, CO too. Same for Oregon, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And last, but far from least, our WaPo story which rings the alarm about a shortage in Washington, DC as well as the surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia..

Each time, Iraq and sometimes Afghanistan was given as the prime reason for why our police departments were having trouble getting their ammunition. Each time, if there was another reason given like, say, copper and other metals being much more expensive thanks to demand in China and India or police departments using much more ammunition because they have taken on Homeland Security duties after 9/11, you didn’t find them until well into the article. In the WaPo article, they didn’t appear until the 12th and 13th paragraph. The fake reason leads the article while the real reasons get shoved down where folks usually don’t bother to read.

How do I know that Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with this problem? Glad you asked. Bob Owens, who blogs as Confederate Yankee, contacted the largest ammo manufacturer in the country and asked them if there was, in fact, a shortage and what the source of that shortage was. Here’s what the spokesman said.

Since 9/11 we’ve seen a huge jump in demand from law enforcement. In the last fiscal year alone we saw demand from law enforcement jump 40%. By running our civil plants 24/7, hiring hundreds of new employees and streamlining our manufacturing processes we were able to increase our deliveries to law enforcement by 30% in that same period. In addition, we’ve just announced we’ll be investing another $5 million in new production lines at our civil ammunition facilities.

He continued.

Manufacturing capacity is the main issue. As you might imagine, for a precision manufacturing business that faced many years of steady demand, it can be quite a challenge to suddenly meet double-digit growth in demand…

This, by the way, is the same company that the Seattle Times contacted in their article. Somehow, they didn’t manage to ask this question or, if they did, they didn’t see fit to print this information. Curious, I’d say.

Owens also pointed out that the spokesman for this very same company did not accept the MSM reasons of Iraq and Afghanistan. He also notes that the AP was dead wrong to say that the company uses the same equipment to make their civilian and military ammunitions. He also received word from CON-BOR/Glaser that cited the war effort and also the increased demand from China which is, “buying up lots of the copper and lead for their building boom”. The manager from the military production department as Remington arms flatly denies that military demands haver affected their ability to provide ammunition and equipment to police.

That makes, as he notes, three top manufacturers who provide ammo to the military either flatly deny the MSM contention that wartime demand is causing these shortages. It’s a shame that an institution like the Washington Post would run such a shabby and thoroughly discredited story over a week after it had been discredited.

You have to wonder if they are that badly misinformed or just that biased. If blogger like me can find good information not even ten minutes after I read their story, you would hope that a newspaper, with their vaunted layers and layers of fact-checking and their sizeable newsroom budget, would manage to stumble across it at some point, too.

Assuming they’re looking for the truth.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.