Does your university stock grenade launchers?

Number of U.S. universities that have received military equipment from the Defense Department since 1998 : 117

That have received mine-resistant vehicles : 6

Grenade launchers : 2

From the Harper’s Index. They are silent on which 2. But I’m picturing Drew Gilpin Faust with one hanging over her office fireplace.

26 Responses

  1. From the Chronicle of Higher Education, which Harper’s references:

    Should the campus police at the University of Central Florida ever need a grenade launcher, one sits waiting in the department’s armory. Repurposed to fire tear-gas canisters, the weapon was used several years ago for training exercises, according to Richard Beary, the university’s chief of police. It hasn’t left storage since.

    At Central Florida, which has an enrollment of nearly 60,000 and a Division I football team, the device was acquired, a police spokeswoman said, for “security and crowd control.” But the university’s police force isn’t the only one to have come upon a grenade launcher. Hinds Community College—located in western Mississippi, with a student population of 11,000—had one too. (Campus police officers at Hinds declined to comment. A woman who worked for the department but declined to identify herself said that the launcher had been repurposed to shoot flares but that the college no longer possessed it.)