Lake City Army Ammunition Plant

Estes Thompson reports that "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" ("Ammunition Shortage Squeezes Police," Associated Press, 17 August 2007). Anyone who thinks the "War on Terror" has made America safer is an ass.

In the same wire dispatch, by the way, one learns a very intriguing fact:

The Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Mo., directly supplies the military with more than 80 percent of its small-arms ammunition. Production at the factory has more than tripled since 2002, rising from roughly 425 million rounds that year to 1.4 billion rounds in 2006, according to the Joint Munitions Command at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois.

Most of the rest of the military's small-arms ammunition comes from Falls Church, Va.-based General Dynamics Corp., which relies partly on subcontractors -- some of whom also supply police departments. (emphasis added)

That is a potential chokepoint.