INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Christopher Hixon, a 27-year veteran of the Navy who served in the Persian Gulf, trained with government ammunition that typically had a distinctive "LC" marking on its brass casings.
In 2018, Hixon, then the athletic director at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., confronted a former student firing an AR-15-style gun. The semi-automatic rifle, modeled on a military weapon, was loaded with ammunition carrying the same "LC" stamp.
Hixon took a bullet in a thigh. Two more hit him in the chest. In the bloodstained hallway where he died, investigators found a brass casing. And another. By the end of their search, they had collected 84 from across the school — each marked "LC."
The initials stand for the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant. Built during World War II, the federal site in Independence, Mo., has made nearly all the rifle cartridges used by the U.S. military since it pulled out of Vietnam.
In recent years, the factory has also pumped billions of rounds of military-grade ammunition into the commercial market, an investigation by the New York Times found, leaving the "LC" signature scattered across crime scenes, including the sites of some of the nation's most heinous mass shootings.
The plant, operated by a private contractor with Army oversight, is now one of the country's biggest manufacturers of commercial rounds for the popular AR-15, and it remains so even as the United States supplies ammunition to Ukraine.
The vast majority of Lake City rounds sold by retailers have gone to law-abiding citizens, from hunters and farmers to target shooters. Some are drawn to them because they are made with the same materials and often to the same specifications as the military's, while others see them as an authentic accessory for their tactical weapons and gear.
But more than 1 million pages of search warrants, police evidence logs, ballistic reports, forfeiture records and court proceedings compiled by the Times provide a sweeping accounting of how Lake City ammunition, once intended for war, has also cut a criminal path across towns and cities in nearly all 50 states.
Lake City rounds have been seized from drug dealers, violent felons, anti-government groups, rioters at the U.S. Capitol and smugglers for Mexican cartels. They were confiscated from a man in Massachusetts who threatened to assassinate President Barack Obama and from a man at Los Angeles International Airport after he fired at a civilian and three Transportation Security Administration agents, killing one.
Starting in 2012 with the massacre of 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the rounds have been tied to at least a dozen mass shootings involving AR-15-style guns, including at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis; and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The availability to consumers of rifle cartridges made at an Army site is the fruit of a symbiotic relationship between the Defense Department and the ammunition industry. A legacy of the war on terror, the federal contract to operate Lake City's sprawling manufacturing campus is intended to save taxpayers money while keeping it ready to ramp up at a moment's notice.
When the military needs ammunition, the contractor is required to make it, but it is otherwise free to keep production lines humming with commercial operations.
Over the last two decades, the government has invested more than $860 million to improve and repair the plant and expand its capacity, according to Justine Barati, an Army spokeswoman. The Army has also required Lake City contractors to pick up some costs. Under the current arrangement, the contractor has covered at least $10 million a year in improvements — an amount that can grow, depending on production levels. The payments are earmarked for projects ranging from office renovations to equipment upgrades.
The Defense Department argues that the public-private partnership is necessary for national security.
"We don't maintain and/or improve our ammo plants because it's 'economical' to do so," Doug Bush, an assistant secretary of the Army in charge of acquisitions, said in a statement. "We do it to ensure we have government-owned production capacity for military-specific items that we can surge in case of a conflict."
A Defense Department official, in a statement, said "commercial utilization brings lower costs to the Army and taxpayer, and keeps a skilled work force better positioned to respond to surge requirements." The official said a 2021 study found that the government received a 10% to 15% discount on ammunition by allowing commercial sales.
The trade-off for ordinary Americans is that commercial ammunition for the AR-15 is being manufactured in large quantities on government property with little or no public accountability as to how it is marketed and sold.
Secrecy around the arrangement has helped to hide its scale, and the Army has played down the plant's role in manufacturing ammunition for civilians. A recent media tour of Lake City focused on its military operations and economic benefits to the region but did not include access to the building where most commercial rounds are made.
The current contractor, Olin Winchester, which began running Lake City in October 2020, is required to regularly file reports to the Army on commercial production and sales. While the information is not classified, it is closely guarded. Military officials described it as proprietary and recommended requesting details from Olin Winchester, which did not respond to emails or phone calls from the Times.
By reviewing annual reports, earnings-call transcripts and government documents and interviewing more than 40 former employees and others with knowledge of Lake City's operations, the Times was able to determine that the site had manufactured hundreds of millions of rounds for the commercial market every year since at least 2011.
For most of that period, its commercial operations outstripped its military business. By 2021, commercial output — which includes retail sales as well as purchases by law enforcement agencies and foreign governments — had outpaced military production by more than two times, according to a historical overview the Army provided in a graphic during the media tour. Later, the Army declined to share the underlying data and at one point denied the graphic existed.
The .223-caliber and 5.56 mm cartridges — the most common rounds for the AR-15 — have been sold under a variety of brands at stores and through websites. Even spent Lake City casings have a robust market because of their quality. A federal investigation after the 2017 shooting that killed 60 and wounded hundreds more at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip found that the gunman had bought Lake City casings that had been reloaded with new primers, powder and bullets.
In a 2021 earnings call for Olin Winchester's parent company, analysts said that ammunition profits far exceeded projections. Executives credited the Lake City contract.
"Not only has it become part of our military business," said Scott Sutton, the top executive at the company, Olin Corp., "but also part of our commercial business."
The plant was built during World War II, and mothballed when the U.S. was not in a war-time action. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Lake City plant was reopened and Army paid nearly $50 million to expand production. Other U.S. manufacturers had the capacity to make just 300 million rounds of the ammunition it required, the Army found, compelling it to look abroad for more.
An Army general, called before Congress, pledged not to repeat the mistake of "building capacity during wartime only to dismantle the capacity in peacetime."
One possible fix, described in a government report, was to keep the equipment at the ready but adjust the number of work shifts to the rhythms of war.
The contractor at the time, ATK, or Alliant Techsystems, favored a different solution, according to people familiar with the discussions: When military demand fell, the company would fill the shortfall with rounds to be sold commercially.
In the early 1990s, a law aimed at cutting defense budgets had made it legal to conduct commercial business at certain government-owned defense installations. A previous Lake City contractor had sold some ammunition to the public, and ATK continued the practice, using packaging from Federal Cartridge, a respected ammunition maker it acquired in 2001.
When ATK merged with the aerospace company Orbital the following year, ATK's sporting division was spun off as Vista Outdoor, which is headquartered in Anoka. Led by Mark DeYoung, Vista received a three-year exclusive contract to sell Lake City's commercial products.
DeYoung told investors that while firearms were a good business, ammunition was where the real money was.
Lake City played an important role in those new sales as demand for its products, once determined by the needs of war, increasingly followed the events driving the nation's rancorous debate on guns.
Vista has a deal to sell Federal and the rest of its Sporting Products group to Prague-based Czechoslovak Group.
"Federal Cartridge Company proudly supplies ammunition to the military, law enforcement and civilians for sporting and personal protection purposes," Federal said in a statement to the Star Tribune. "We are committed to complying with all applicable laws, and strongly condemn any criminal misuse of our products."
The rounds quickly found a cult following among fans of military-style weapons. A guide to ammunition on AR15.com praised them as "outstanding" and "flawlessly reliable." In chat rooms on the site, gun gurus recommended stocking up because they were in short supply.
In 2009, Army officials added a clause to the Lake City contract requiring a capacity of 1.6 billion rounds. Keeping the plant hot with commercial sales was the most obvious solution because its machinery, once stopped, could take weeks or longer to come back online, and continuous production would also keep workers at the ready, according to interviews.
By the time ATK's contract came up for bidding again in 2011, the company was selling hundreds of millions of Lake City rounds a year to retailers and other commercial customers, according to earnings reports and government documents.
In its response to questions, the Defense Department did not address the use of Lake City ammunition in mass killings and other crimes but said "there is currently no plan" to end commercial sales.
The Star Tribune contributed to this report.
