By Timothy Birdnow ——Bio and Archives--September 14, 2014
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"Should the campus police at the University of Central Florida ever need a modified grenade launcher, one sits waiting in the department’s armory. Retooled to fire tear-gas canisters, the weapon was used several years ago for training purposes, 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.) Both institutions received their launchers from the same source: the Department of Defense. At least 117 colleges have acquired equipment from the department through a federal program, known as the 1033 program, that transfers military surplus to law-enforcement agencies across the country, according to records The Chronicle received after filing Freedom of Information requests with state governments (see table of equipment). Campus police departments have used the program to obtain military equipment as mundane as men’s trousers (Yale University) and as serious as a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle (Ohio State University). Along with the grenade launcher, Central Florida acquired 23 M-16 assault rifles from the Department of Defense."The article goes on to provide a list of weapons supplied by Uncle Sam.
"Which brings us back to the original question: as the NYT succinctly summarizes the situation, “as President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s “long season of war,” the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice.”Perhaps that sentence needs some qualification: as Obama, humiliated on the international arena by everyone, from Assad to Putin and back, and desperately seeking to avoid future embarrassment, redeploys weapons of mass murder, why is he seeking to put said weapons – many of which are of the offensive kind – not out to pasture but in America’s very own back yard? Just who does Obama plan to wage his next, and hopefully last, war against? The good news is that everyone will get sufficient advance notice before said war begins by the squadrons of weaponized drones sent out to test the ground, and inflict the “accidental” collateral damage casualty, or million." Good question. When the Soviet Union was in peril I translated a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev (Pronounced mee-kai-eel, not McHail like some sort of Golden Arch product, and the last name is Gor-ba-choff, by the way) warned the U.S. of the danger of a Soviet Collapse, that all of the weapons held by the U.S.S.R. would wind up in the hands of, well, whosoever grabbed them. Gorby's warning is equally germane here; America is sending these weapons hither and yon, to everyone except the People themselves. But in this case the weapons are going to strange places, to non-military wings of the government, to colleges, to people who could perhaps use them in a civil war - against the American people. Certainly these weapons are being stockpiled for a reason.
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Timothy Birdnow is a conservative writer and blogger and lives in St. Louis Missouri. His work has appeared in many popular conservative publications including but not limited to The American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Intellectual Conservative and Orthodoxy Today. Tim is a featured contributor to American Daily Reviewand has appeared as a Guest Host on the Heading Right Radio Network. Tim’s website is tbirdnow.mee.nu.