California has long been hell on private citizens owning just about any kind of firearm, but the so-called assault weapon is one of the focuses of the state’s anti-gunners’ ire. They hate it, calling it a weapon of war and saying that it serves no purpose but to kill a bunch of people very quickly.
Which is why it’s darkly hilarious that the state’s various school police forces have them.
However, despite the animosity toward modern sporting rifles exhibited up and down the line, it seems those same school police forces have a compliance problem.
Police forces at California’s K-12 schools have quietly been purchasing and using military equipment for decades — and some have yet to comply with a state law requiring them to disclose that to the public.
In 2014, public records revealed the Pentagon had armed California public school police agencies with surplus military gear. The Los Angeles School Police Department, supplied with grenade launchers, assault rifles and an armored vehicle, faced strong criticism from local civil rights groups and relinquished its federally-donated armory by 2016.
But beyond the Pentagon’s surplus program, law enforcement agencies including school police have the option to purchase military-grade equipment on their own. Nine of California’s 21 public school police forces have bought their own stashes of military-grade equipment, including semi-automatic rifles, less-lethal launchers and smoke grenades. Under the state’s Penal Code, less-lethal weapons are devices meant to incapacitate or stun someone without killing them, though some of these devices have maimed and killed in the past.
Five of the school police forces have not disclosed their inventory to the public this year, in spite of a 2021 state law requiring them to do so annually. Two of them, at San Diego Unified School District and Montebello Unified School District, published up-to-date inventory reports after CalMatters asked for them. The remaining two police departments, at Twin Rivers Unified and Santa Ana Unified, released reports for the first time in 2026 after owning the weapons for years.
School districts say these weapons improve police ability to respond to critical incidents and threats, apprehend violent suspects, and help with crowd control. In April, Twin Rivers school police in Sacramento County brought out its military-grade patrol rifles while responding to a shooting at an out-of-district high school where a teenager was killed. At that time, the police department did not have a military equipment policy in place.
Now, I understand all kinds of reasons why a school police department might feel the need for an AR-15 or even an M4 or 12. It’s not a murder-death-kill machine that’s only fit for battlefields, after all. They’re good rifles for fighting back against those with hostile intent, especially from outside of handgun range or against multiple bad guys.
What bothers me here is the hypocrisy.
This is state law. They’re required to hand over this information to the state, and they don’t. Plus, these are guns folks like you and me aren’t allowed to have in the state, but the people whose biggest daily task is breaking up a fight in the cafeteria can have literal military hardware, simply because they’re a police department.
Yeah, that bugs me.
Will anything come of this? Probably not. It’s par for the course with California, because it’s a state that’s not really anti-gun. It’s anti-you. It doesn’t want you to have a gun, because then you might not need the state to come swooping in and enact the entire DSA agenda or something.
It’s insane, but it’s also typical. This is how anti-gun states view these same weapons are too dangerous to be entrusted to people like you and me. They’ll let the school cops have them, do just about nothing when those departments don’t follow the rules, and then rain hellfire down on anyone who might have printed something gun-shaped on their 3D printer.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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