Did the IRS just begin buying ammunition during President Joe Biden's time in office? No, that's not true: The IRS started buying ammunition, firearms and equipment for its law enforcement divisions more than 100 years ago. It's standard for federal agencies that have many federal law enforcement officers to buy ammunition, firearms and equipment.
The claim appeared in an article (archived here) titled "Biden's IRS Starts Buying Up Ammunitions as Biden Vows to Disarm Ordinary Citizens." It was published by News Punch on June 20, 2022. It opened:
Biden's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has begun buying up large quantities of ammunition as Democrats prepare to strip ordinary Americans of their guns.
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Biden's IRS Starts Buying Up Ammunitions as Biden Vows to Disarm Ordinary Citizens - News Punch
Biden's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has begun buying up large quantities of ammunition as Democrats prepare to strip ordinary Americans of their guns.
The fact that the IRS buys ammunition is nothing new and didn't start with Biden's presidency. In 2018, when former President Donald Trump was still in office, the Government Accountability Office published a report titled "FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT Purchases and Inventory Controls of Firearms, Ammunition, and Tactical Equipment." The report detailed spending on ammunition, firearms and equipment for federal law enforcement divisions of 20 federal agencies.
The IRS Criminal Investigation unit investigates potential criminal violations of federal tax and financial law. According to the 2018 GAO report, the unit had 2,148 federal law enforcement officers and an inventory of 3,282 pistols, 621 shotguns, 539 rifles, 15 fully automatic firearms and four revolvers. The report also stated that the unit had more than five million rounds of ammunition for various firearms -- mostly pistol and revolver rounds -- as of December 2017.
The report shows spending data regarding ammunition, firearms and equipment bought by the IRS Criminal Investigation unit as far back as fiscal year 2010, when former President Barack Obama was in office. The other IRS law enforcement division that spent money on ammunition before Biden's presidency was the IRS Police Force, which at the time the report was published was located at the Enterprise Computing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
In an email to Lead Stories sent on June 21, 2022, Chuck Young, managing director of the GAO's Office of Public Affairs, told us that the 2018 report contains the most recent data the GAO had on IRS ammunition, firearms and equipment at the time of writing.
In an email sent to Lead Stories on June 23, 2022, an IRS spokesperson reiterated that the IRS Criminal Investigation unit is a federal law enforcement agency and said that its special agents "have been carrying firearms throughout the more than 100-year history of the agency." The spokesperson said that the unit's special agents are "required to train and qualify for their weapons to maintain proficiency." The spokesperson also provided us with updated figures regarding the unit's ammunition:
Between March 1 and June 1, IRS-CI ordered $696,000 in ammunition, which accounts for almost all orders placed in Fiscal Year 2022. The amount of ammunition purchased during this period will be used for the required special agent annual qualifications. CI currently employs over 2,000 sworn special agents.
However, the spokesperson noted that the ammunition referenced in the disclosed period has not been received by the unit at the time of writing and would take several months to arrive.
About News Punch
NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire) has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page "The People's Voice" even lost its verification checkmark according to a 2018 report from Media Matters For America.
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The site was profiled in The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 where it was described as:
Your News Wire, a 3-year-old website of murky facts and slippery spin, is published by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway -- a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 -- out of an apartment in L.A.'s historic El Royale.
RationalWiki described it as:
YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto ('News. Truth. Unfiltered').
A while ago we reported that YourNewsWire had rebranded itself as NewsPunch by changing its domain name in an apparent effort to evade filtering/blocking.
