This post was updated Sept. 25 at 8:55 p.m.

Like many members of the Bruin community, I was alarmed to discover that UCLA intends to significantly expand its police arsenal prior to the 2024-2025 academic year. At its Sept. 19 meeting, the UC Board of Regents approved requests from UCLA and several other campuses to purchase equipment including drones, rifle-style projectile launchers and thousands of “kinetic rounds” – an industry term for projectiles intended merely to injure, not to kill.

The UCLA administration received the Regents’ permission to buy eight new air rifles. Four of these will be FN Herstal 303 Tactical launchers, which use compressed gas to send projectiles up to 50 meters. This particular make of air gun, due to its comparatively short barrel, is marketed in particular for indoor use – like, for example, against students staging a sit-in in a university building.

The other four air guns are to be Pepper Ball VK-SBL launchers, which fire paintball-like plastic capsules stuffed with chemical lachrymators such as capsaicin or nonivamide, also known as PAVA. These substances stimulate blistering to mucus membranes, accelerating tear production and causing symptoms like temporary blindness, gagging and obstructed breathing – all of which have been linked to multiple deaths.

UCLA also received permission to purchase a staggering quantity of ammunition to use with these weapons: no fewer than 3,000 rounds of FTC Capsaicin-PAVA pellets, colloquially known as pepper balls, as well as hundreds more projectiles, including one designed to release clouds of capsaicin powder upon impact.

These devices have no legitimate use on a university campus – unless, of course, you consider the gassing and shooting of student protesters by campus cops to be a legitimate academic endeavor.

As the novelist and philosopher William T. Vollmann wrote, “the danger of all weapons” is “that the beauty and rightness of their form makes one want to employ them whether it is proper or not.”

Personally, I don’t find air guns and pepper balls beautiful, exactly, but still, I can’t deny that the “rightness of their form” is a big part of their appeal.

“Less-than-lethal weapons” are automatically presumed to be safe, so police don’t hesitate to use them against protesters, picketers, bystanders and anyone else whose presence they regard as inconvenient.

But new scholars – and research done by myself and UCLA professor Terence Keel – have revealed this presumption of safety to be deeply flawed.

The history of pepper-based munitions, in particular, is especially troubling. As Keel and I wrote recently in the academic journal “Isis,” pepper spray’s “fundamental nonlethality” was always “assumed as a given and so never confirmed by rigorous scientific trials.” There is a deep historical reason for this – namely, red pepper was first weaponized by Europeans in the context of colonialism and racial slavery, which created a durable scientific bias that regarded non-white, and especially Black, bodies as less susceptible to the substance’s painful effects.

But there is also a more direct reason: In the 1980s, the major pepper spray manufacturers bribed the FBI agent entrusted with overseeing research about the product. The scandal came to light a few years later, but by that point the damage was done – pepper-based munitions were already in use throughout the U.S.

Said simply, so-called “less-than-lethal weapons” can and do cause major injuries, including lethal ones. The evidence is indisputable. Even weapons manufacturers have had to acknowledge this fact in recent years, quietly adopting the apologetic term “less-lethal” to replace the misleading “non-lethal” or “less-than-lethal” designations that used to be the norm.

For example, last year UCLA students got a taste of the injurious potential of so-called “sponge rounds” – projectiles that, while not made of metal, can nevertheless cause catastrophic and permanent damage to the eyes, throat, skull and other sensitive bodily regions.

Even the owner’s manual for the ​​VK-SBL, one of the air rifles our university intends to buy, warns that shots to the “head, face, eyes, ears, throat, groin or spine” could cause “severe or permanent injury or death.”

It is shocking and offensive to me, on a personal level, that the UCLA Chancellor’s Office would see fit to offer me a postdoctoral fellowship so that I can investigate the junk science behind pepper balls and other such products – and then, just a few months later, attempt to purchase those very weapons for use against my colleagues and students.

UCLA administrators have every reason to know about and appreciate the dangers posed by these products. Clearly, they just don’t care.

It could not be more obvious that UCLA’s request is motivated by the expectation that students will again gather on campus this quarter to make their voices heard – including by protesting Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people in ways that may make university leaders a touch uncomfortable – as they should.

I’m proud to work with students brave enough to risk their own safety and reputations to stand up for what’s right, as they did by briefly disrupting the Sept. 19 meeting. Regent Jay Sures instructed police wearing riot helmets to threaten the students with arrest if they did not comply with a dispersal order from the public meeting, then moved immediately to bring the weapons requests to a vote, without addressing procedural questions raised earlier by Regent John A. Pérez and during a moment when multiple Regents eligible to vote on the matter were not present in the room.

But I’m deeply ashamed – and outraged – that the leaders of my university are apparently so callous and cavalier as to build up an arsenal of discredited weapons for no purpose except to shoot dangerous projectiles and toxic chemicals at defenseless groups of my pupils and peers.

UCLA’s success in purchasing these devices means many members of our campus community are likely to be grievously injured. When that happens, our leaders will have no excuse for their recklessness. They have been warned.

Jonah Walters is a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Society and Genetics. He is at work on a book about the history of “less-than-lethal” police weapons and is the co-author, with UCLA professor Terence Keel, of a recent paper about pepper spray published in the academic journal “Isis.”