Grenade launchers. Tear gas canisters. Armored trucks. M-16 rifles.

No longer is such military-grade weaponry limited to your local Army or Marine Corps base. This Chronicle of Higher Education piece indicates that the Department of Defense has sent such “tactical gear” to more than one hundred colleges around the country. As part of the Defense Department’s program, schools only have to pay shipping costs.

The campus police tend to have the “if it’s available, why not take it” mentality. But some are worried that when the biggest crimes on campus are related to alcohol- and drug-related incidents, this extreme ratcheting up of resources and equipment is unnecessary and could even have a chilling effect on free speech.

I’m in that latter camp here. As Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska, an expert on police militarization, said in an interview with the Chronicle, the new program could create a situation in which a small police department can “go rapidly from one of protecting and serving to one of viewing the community as the enemy, and a potential threat.”