U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Maxwell fires an M-16 using a three-round burst at the Joe Foss range during a weapons training in Taqaddum, Iraq, July 27, 2008. The Seabees, assigned to a mobile construction battalion, are on a six-month deployment to Iraq to provide general engineering support to coalition forces. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Dustin Coveny, via defense.gov
In the wake of Ferguson, it's become common knowledge that city police departments are getting their hands on more and more decommissioned military equipment (or, in the case of Orlando, expensive, brand new military-style equipment). But today, the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that it's not just city police getting in on the game – police on college campuses are also building mini arsenals of decommissioned equipment obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense.
In the leading sentence of its story on the subject, written by Dan Bauman, the Chronicle reveals that the University of Central Florida owns a military grenade launcher that's modified to shoot teargas canisters, and in an accompanying table showing which U.S. colleges have obtained equipment from the Department of Defense, it also shows that the campus is home to 23 M-16 assault rifles.
According to the story, UCF's grenade launcher was obtained for crowd control, and the M-16s are stored in vehicles for emergencies. You can read the complete story and search the inventory of military equipment owned by 117 U.S. colleges at the Chronicle's website.
