Dear Editor:

Last year the U.S. government announced the purchase of hundreds of millions of rounds of 9mm hollow point ammunition. Hollow point bullets are banned from military use by the Geneva Convention.

Three days ago, it was revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had contracted to purchase an “additional” 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition over the next five years.

Expert analysts noted that during the worst of the war in Iraq, American troops shot up 5.5 million rounds per month.

This recent purchase means that the DHS will have enough ammunition to wage war at the Iraq war level here - in the continental U.S. - for 24 years.

This week the DHS announced that it had purchased 2,700 land mine resistant armored vehicles for use in the United States.

And very recently, as the result of an inquiry through the Freedom of Information Act, it was learned that the DHS has acquired an entire fleet of Predator-B drones custom-designed for the DHS to be able to track cell phones, to be “capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not” and equipped with “interception systems.”

On March 4, in a letter to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and again in testimony before Congress, Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder, refused to rule out the possibility of drone strikes against Americans - here in America! And Holder failed to deny that said strikes could be made without a hearing, a warrant, trial by jury or a warning of any kind. So just who decides who dies?

And who exactly are the DHS drone tracking? DHS appears uninterested in securing our southern border with Mexico. Maybe the drones can find some of the 2,000-plus guns the U.S. government sent illegally to Mexican drug lords in the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme that killed two U.S. Border Patrol agents.

If the threats to the homeland are so serious as to require a fleet of armed drones, billions of bullets and thousands of armored vehicles, why the U.S. government push to disarm ordinary American citizens?

Won’t gun and magazine bans leave ordinary Americans unable to defend themselves and the homeland from these threats?

Unless we are the threat…

Doesn’t anybody see what is about to happen in America?

Ronald B. Elder, M.D.

Russellville