Early in President Obama's first term, there was a video of him being interviewed about a program whereby he would create a civilian defense force as well-armed and trained as the military's Special Forces. It seemed like a strange topic at the time and the video has since been removed from the Internet.

However, in light of the Department of Homeland Security's procurements and solicitations for guns and ammunition in the last year, a lot of speculation has popped up on Internet sites. The solicitations are posted on federal government Internet sites and the requests for proposals show a request for 7,000 assault rifles with high capacity magazines, chambered for the 5.56 caliber NATO rounds. The procurements also include 9mm and .40 caliber pistol ammunitions as well as 200,000 sniper rounds. Of the millions of rounds of ammunition requested, 450 million are to be hollow point rounds.

If you couple this with the president's policies of relieving military commanders who have indicated they would not order troops under their command to fire on American civilians in a civil disturbance, you begin to think that DHS may be building a civilian defense force. Or maybe they are serious about securing the U.S. borders. You be the judge.

In recent history there are a couple of well-known regimes that resorted to the creation of a powerful civilian defense force. One was the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin known as the NKVD which later became the KGB. And Nazi Germany under Adolph Hitler created the Gestapo. If you are not familiar with these two organizations you may want to do a little research to see how they operated under the precepts of these two socialist dictators.

William D. Coulson

Marissa