In the weeks before a gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, he purchased 2,115 rounds of ammunition. Every one of them was made at a U.S. Army-owned facility just outside Kansas City, Mo.
Later that year, another shooter walked into a St. Louis high school equipped with over 400 rounds from the same plant. He killed a student and a teacher in an attack with bullets designed for use on the battlefield.
The use of ammunition manufactured at the facility, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, was not unusual: Its products have become a common denominator in crimes involving 5.56-millimeter and .223-caliber rounds, the most widely used cartridges for AR-15-style weapons, according to new data that provides a rare window into Lake City’s role in the ecosystem for the popular firearms.
The data, reported here for the first time, is from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and was obtained by The New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists through public records requests.
From 2017 to 2024, law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations reported spent Lake City casings to the A.T.F. at more than twice the rate of any other manufacturer of 5.56 and .223 cartridges, the records show. The finding is based on information submitted to the A.T.F. by more than 7,400 law enforcement agencies on crimes ranging from burglary to homicide. It provides the most comprehensive accounting to date of Lake City ammunition’s use in crimes.
Commonly available for sale online and at stores across the nation, the AR-15 — known by its admirers as “America’s rifle” — offers civilians firepower similar to that of an American infantry soldier and has featured prominently in some of the country’s most infamous mass shootings.
Yet relatively little is known about the role that Lake City’s production plays in the broader market for AR-15 ammunition. Industry data is hard to come by, and the Pentagon has declined to release comprehensive information about production, even in the face of Congressional inquiries, arguing that the information includes the contractor’s proprietary data, documents show.
Army officials said they could not respond to the new findings because of the government shutdown. But in a letter to members of Congress on Jan. 15, senior Army officials acknowledged that they did not “vet or approve commercial sales of ammunition” made at Lake City and had not conducted any investigation or analysis of its use in violent crime.
For Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was killed in the Uvalde shooting, the lack of transparency is “disturbing.”
Ms. Mata-Rubio, who has become a national advocate for gun control, said she was shocked to learn about the role of an Army manufacturing facility in her child’s death, and concerned that so little information about it was available to the public. “Why don’t we have the full data for production and sales?” she said. “Is it because the government knows that it is subsidizing commercial ammo tied to domestic bloodshed?”
Senator Elizabeth Warren described the findings as “horrifying,” saying in a statement that “our government shouldn’t be subsidizing gun violence.” In 2024, Ms. Warren and a group of other Democratic members of Congress introduced a bill that would, among other things, prohibit Department of Defense contractors from selling “military-grade assault weapons and ammunition to civilians,” but it never made it to the floor for a vote.
The bill followed a 2023 investigation into Lake City by The Times that revealed the scale of its ammunition production for civilians and tied the ammunition to a dozen mass shootings, as well as other crimes across the nation.
The new data goes much further, showing how the sheer volume of Lake City’s production has flooded the market and made its ammunition a presence in far more criminal investigations than previously known.
Lake City, built during World War II to supply the U.S. military, is operated by a private contractor with Army oversight. It is the largest manufacturer of rifle ammunition for the U.S. armed forces and has produced rounds for sale to American allies and domestic law enforcement agencies. But the facility has also pumped billions of its rounds into U.S. retail markets, where they have been sold by the nation’s largest ammunition companies under a variety of brand names.
For more than a decade, the Army has encouraged the contractors who run Lake City to use excess capacity at the plant — which is required to maintain manufacturing capacity of over 1.6 billion rounds a year — to make cartridges for the commercial market. The arrangement is meant to provide an affordable solution to a longstanding problem: how to keep ammunition production lines active and ready for war in periods of low military demand.
A vast majority of the cartridges have undoubtedly gone to ordinary gun owners, such as target shooters and hunters. But the rounds are also readily available to criminals, who can buy them cheaply and in bulk from gun shops, big-box retailers and websites, offered in packages ranging from 20-round boxes to 1,000-round cases.
Supporters of the plant’s civilian production say that it plays an important role in ensuring a reliable flow of ammunition to both the U.S. military and law-abiding consumers, and that its operators cannot be held responsible for how that ammunition is used.
Lake City makes various types of ammunition, including cartridges that can be fired from AK-47s and from .50 caliber rifles — guns large enough to destroy a car’s engine block or to down a small plane. But the plant’s bread and butter are the 5.56 and .223 rounds — the kinds most often used in AR-15-style firearms.
The data linking Lake City casings to crimes comes from the A.T.F. National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, known as NIBIN. There is no comprehensive national database of ammunition used in crimes, but thousands of law enforcement agencies report ballistics evidence recovered during criminal investigations to NIBIN.
And when it came to criminal investigations involving 5.56 and .223 rounds, those agencies were significantly more likely to report finding a Lake City casing than any other kind, according to an I.C.I.J. analysis of those records from 2017 to 2024.
The new data from the A.T.F. suggests that Lake City’s massive production has far exceeded that of any other manufacturer of 5.56 and .223 rounds, helping to make ammunition for AR-15-style guns cheaper and more accessible for both ordinary gun owners and criminals.
Overall, the facility’s products accounted for about 29 percent of the more than 79,500 of those casings recovered by law enforcement agencies during criminal investigations and entered into NIBIN from 2017 to 2024. No other manufacturer came close. No. 2, the South Korean company Poongsan Corporation, made up about 13 percent.
While the data provides insight into the pervasiveness of ammunition made at Lake City, the real scale of its criminal use is probably far greater than the numbers suggest, both in the quantity of cartridges found during each investigation and in the number of crimes committed with them.
The information entered into the NIBIN system is used to link spent casings to the guns that fired them, helping law enforcement officers determine whether a particular firearm was used in multiple crimes. For that reason, examiners typically only submit one spent casing to the system for each gun connected to a crime. In 2024, for example, law enforcement agencies submitted nearly 5,500 Lake City casings to the A.T.F. But for every casing submitted, investigators may have collected tens or even hundreds more.
There were about 17,500 law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2018 (the latest data available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics). Some do not participate in NIBIN, or may have misidentified the manufacturer because some Lake City ammunition made for the commercial market does not have the plant’s distinctive markings.
In Uvalde, the shooter purchased his ammunition in two tranches: 375 rounds at a local gun shop and 1,740 rounds from an online store. In both cases, information on receipts obtained by the A.T.F. pointed to ammunition manufactured at Lake City.
Surplus ammunition from Lake City has been available to civilians for decades, but commercial production of the ammunition at the facility began in earnest in the late 2000s.
The U.S. military faced ammunition shortfalls in the early years of the war on terror, and, in an effort to avoid similar problems in the future, Army officials required the contractor that ran Lake City to maintain an annual production capacity of more than 1.6 billion rounds of various types of ammunition. To achieve that mandate, they gave the operator two choices: maintain the equipment in a state of readiness or use the excess capacity to make rounds for the commercial market. The contractor chose the latter, and, fed by the growing popularity of AR-15-style rifles, civilian sales of the ammunition exploded.
Army officials have said that the deal cuts the costs of the military’s own ammunition purchases by as much as 15 percent, a saving they have estimated at roughly $25 million to $35 million a year. In practice, the Army has rarely come close to using Lake City’s full capacity. In 2021, it purchased about 434.3 million rounds, while total production topped one billion.
The deal has been a moneymaker for the series of companies contracted to operate Lake City and make ammunition there. Olin Winchester took over the facility in 2020 after beating out the defense contractor Northrop Grumman for the $8 billion manufacturing contract. In its 2021 annual report, the company’s parent corporation, Olin, noted that its income from Winchester had surged 130 percent over the previous fiscal year, driven by higher prices and Lake City’s additional volume.
Olin Winchester did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Northrop Grumman referred questions to the Army.
Lake City’s operator is required to make some investments in the facility. The government also puts its own funds into the plant: As of the end of 2023, it had spent more than $860 million over two decades on improvements and maintenance there.
The Army has carefully guarded information regarding the volume of commercial production at Lake City, hampering public oversight.
In response to the 2023 Times investigation, a group of state attorneys general, representing 19 states and Washington, D.C. — and led by Letitia James of New York — called on the White House to investigate contracting and manufacturing practices at the facility. The federal government, they wrote in a 2024 letter to Stefanie Feldman, director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, should take steps to ensure that “our tax dollars do not subsidize crime and violence.”
Weeks later, 27 of their Republican counterparts responded with their own letter, arguing that a shutdown of commercial production at Lake City would undermine military readiness.
But they also had another, more fundamental concern: that shutting down the plant would threaten the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “Americans cannot exercise this constitutionally protected right to use their firearms without access to ammunition,” they wrote. Without Lake City’s civilian production, they said, “ammunition prices will increase, and ammunition availability will decrease.”
In response to the latest findings, one of the conservative attorneys general, Austin Knudsen of Montana, indicated that his stance had not changed. “An ammunition manufacturer should not be held accountable for a criminal’s actions,” his communications director, Amanda Braynack, said.
Kathleen Cahill contributed reporting. Agustin Armendariz, Jesús Escudero and Delphine Reuter contributed data analysis.
Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between business and politics.
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