What did the EPA need with $1.4M worth of guns?

What did the EPA need with $1.4M worth of guns? « Hot Air
It stems from an audit of the department’s spending conducted by Open the Books, a nonprofit outfit pushing for more transparency in the federal government. This comes on the heels of previous revelations, such as the discovery that the EPA had run up a $92M tab for designer furniture recently. But this one is even more curious. Rather than blowing moderately big dollars on designer roll away desks, the EPA has apparently been dumping more than a million dollars into equipping a small army. (Daily Signal)

The headline of an op-ed by economist Stephen Moore in Investor’s Business Daily sums it up well: “Why Does the EPA Need Guns, Ammo, and Armor to Protect the Environment?”

And not just a few weapons. Open the Books found that the agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on guns, ammo, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear, and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities.

“We were shocked ourselves to find these kinds of pervasive expenditures at an agency that is supposed to be involved in clean air and clean water,” said Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski. “Some of these weapons are for full-scale military operations.”

So the obvious question here is… why? Their report cites one instance where the EPA went into lands owned by a group of miners in Alaska who were potentially hostile, so they would want to be protected from any sudden attack. But even that really doesn’t make all that much sense. A journey like that would obviously require a lot pf planning and preparation, and the feds have any number of other agencies who are fully trained and equipped to handle potentially explosive situations. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to bring a team from Homeland Security or the BATF to go with them? We have to ask how much military training a group of environmental scientists have really received which might prepare them for walking into a firefight..."