The 'national conversation' on domestic arms buildup

Members of Open Carry Temple on an evening stroll through Belton

Taking 'weapons of war' from civilians?

Most people had never seen or heard of an MRAP (Mine Resistant – Ambush Protected) vehicle until the cops on April 19 fanned out through the Boston suburb of Watertown following the bombing of the Marathon race on April 15.

If the revelation on Feb. 15 that the Department of Homeland Security had placed an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of small arms ammo didn't get America's attention, the spectacle of Ninja-suited SWAT troopers storming peoples' homes, making them get out of their houses at gunpoint while looking for guns and a fugitive suspect bomber who killed a cop, woke up a sleeping nation – wide awake.

The massive ammo purchases and the deployment of heavily armored cars for the use of police agencies under the command of DHS has become a hot topic in the nation's business press.(click)

Of 13,000 such vehicles manufactured for the Marine Corps for service in Iraq and Afghanistan by SAIC on an International Harvesters chassis at a cost of $600,000 apiece, 2,717 are available to domestic police and state cops as well as FBI and other alphabet soup agencies. The transfer is overseen from a Marine command based at Quantico, Virginia.

The vehicles were built under a program that will ultimately cost taxpayers $45 billion for a target delivery of 27,000 MRAP's, a system that at least two defense analysts have termed a colossal waste of taxpayer money. (click)

Or is it? One wonders. Consider the fact that in IED blasts, underbody mine attacks, and small arms fire, troopers usually survive what they would not survive in a Hum-Vee – or the ubiquitous Toyota pickup truck.

The ninjas are snapping them up for their concealed gun ports, turret topped machine gun tubs, v-shaped hulls that deflect shrapnel, and heavily armored bodies and undercarriages – all of which is proven to at least mitigate IED, mine and ambush tactics.

The Pentagon claims the massive armored cars have saved 40,000 lives since they were deployed in 2007.

They are suddenly a very visible presence in the inner cities and suburbs of America at standoffs from Oakland, where the FBI deployed them in pursuit of illegal arms at known redoubts of the Black Panthers, to West, Texas, where federal investigators treated the site of a massive chemical blast and fire at a fertilizer company as a crime scene.

In terms of civil war or massive insurrection, the MRAP's will offer the homeland security forces a way to counterattack, mop up pockets of resistance, and support air-directed assaults by planes, choppers and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

C'est la guerre.

• The Legendary