On the evening of March 28, 2026, USC freshman Tucker Collins was attending a No Kings protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed, screaming and clutching his right eye. Initially, amidst the drums, shouts, and flags, only a few people noticed the young man with long blond hair go down, but as he was pulled to the curb by on-scene independent field medics, it quickly became clear that something was very wrong: he had been shot in the face by an officer monitoring the protests, and his eyeball was completely ruptured.

At the hospital, doctors removed jagged plastic fragments and metal shards from Collins’ eye socket. “When eventually we got to the hospital, and they told me, ‘We’re gonna have to remove your eye,’ I didn’t really know how to process it,” recalled Collins, an aspiring filmmaker. “I understood intimately that this is something that could happen. This is why I was there—to document these sorts of things happening.”Video of the incident quickly circulated online, and one theory was that Collins had been blinded by a PepperBall round, fired from somewhere in the MDC.

This turned out to be incorrect. The plastic fragments and small metal pellets doctors removed were actually fired from a lesser-known and more powerful weapon, the Fabrique Nationale 303 Less Lethal Launcher, or FN303.

A report produced by the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) reveals that the FN303 has been disproportionately responsible for some of the most severe injuries in recent immigration-related protests across the US. The report, titled “Charting the Crackdown,” used open-source methodologies to trace and document misuses of crowd control weapons at immigration related protests from June 2025 through May 2026. The researchers catalogued over 400 incidents of misuse, the vast majority of which were committed by Federal agents.

A peculiar pattern was hidden in the data: although the FN303 makes up only 12 of the 412 total cases of misuse (less than three percent) it was responsible for some of the grisliest and most debilitating injuries documented in the study. In fact, the FN303 was responsible for a higher proportion of severe injuries than those from any other single weapon. The report’s lead author, Dr. Rohini Haar, who is an emergency room doctor and an expert on crowd-control weapons, considered the discovery something of a surprise.“The FN303 is a unique example of something we were not looking for,” she said. “To be honest, even I didn’t know what an FN303 was.”

The FN303 has caused over half a dozen serious injuries between June 2025 and May 2026. But its history of severe, sometimes deadly injuries spans the launcher’s entire 23- year history. When asked about this pattern, Henry de Harenne, Head of Communications at FN Herstal declined to offer details saying that “the review of specific incidents is a matter for the agencies concerned and the competent authorities.”Federal agencies have invested unprecedented amounts of funds in the FN303 in recent months; the Department of Homeland Security is the largest purchaser of the launcher in the Federal government.

Though it’s unclear how much they paid per unit, local law enforcement records from California show launchers selling for $800 each, and according to government contracts, DHS has bought $2.2 million in weapons and projectiles since 2021 alone. The agency’s largest purchase, however, came in September 2025, during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, when they purchased more than $1 million of FN303 launchers and projectiles.

Marketed as highly safe and very accurate, this .68 caliber pneumatic launcher has been used by law enforcement agencies all over the world— from Belgium and Turkey, to Georgia and even Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, whose ministry of defense purchased 2000 launchers in 2009. Though it closely resembles a pepperball or paintball gun, with a plastic body and air tank affixed to the front, it fires a denser and faster-moving projectile that can cause debilitating injuries in crowd control settings.

In some countries, Belgium and Georgia, for instance, deployments of the launcher have triggered national debates about its use in managing protests. But in the US, the FN303 has gone largely unnoticed, even as demonstrators continue to be injured. With the Trump administration pouring nearly $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security through the 2029 fiscal year, the agency made the federal government’s single largest purchase on record of the weapon in September 2025—just as protests peaked across the country.

In 2003, within months of the FN303’s release by Belgian weapons manufacturer FN Herstal, the seriousness of the injuries it inflicts became controversial. On March 29, during protests against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, Swiss police shot union organizer Denise Chervet in the temple with an FN303. She was hospitalized with metal pellets embedded dangerously close to nerve clusters in her face. Fearing permanent paralysis, her doctors refused to operate. Chervet would live with the remnant shards for the rest of her life.

The incident caused an uproar in Switzerland. An investigation conducted by the Council of State of Geneva found that officers had little training on how to safely deploy the FN303 prior to using it, and the cantons of Geneva and Zurich both immediately discontinued its use. A review of Swiss cantonal police agency data reveals that no law enforcement agency in Switzerland that deploys the FN303.

Chervet may have been the first to experience this weapon, but she was far from the last. A little over a year later, on October 21, 2004, celebrations turned to chaos in Boston after the Red Sox defeated the New York Yankees in the ALCS Championship. A responding officer, wielding the FN303, shot and killed Victoria Snelgrove, a 21-year-old journalism student. The investigation into Snelgrove’s death found that the department failed to properly train its officers in the safe deployment of the weapon.

According to the report, Police Deputy Superintendent Robert O’Toole gave an FN303 to an officer who had not been trained or authorized to use it, saying, “Just pull the trigger.”In short, the investigation found that the department had misinterpreted FN Herstal’s claims about the weapon’s ability to penetrate the skin.

“The FN303 appeared to have been viewed by the Department to be not simply ‘less- lethal,’ but really non-lethal,” the report notes. “The fact that the rounds are advertised by the manufacturer as never causing a ‘perforation of the skin,’ which proved to be inaccurate, may have contributed to this misunderstanding.”On the night of Snelgrove’s death, Boston police officers shot two other people in the head with FN303s in Fenway Park, injuring them and causing them to bleed from the face.

“It does not appear that the police immediately understood that these injuries were the result of FN303 projectiles,” reads the report. “If they had, it would have alerted the police that there was a problem with the use of (the) FN303.”Once the broader investigation was completed, which revealed that the weapon was far more dangerous than the department had been led to believe, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis ordered the FN303s destroyed.

ory behind this unusual design is that, upon impact, the round would break open and spread the heavy bismuth across a larger surface area, thus distributing the force of the projectile. Video materials marketing the launcher claim this feature gives the weapon system “sufficient energy to gain compliance from a suspect with minimal risk of skin penetration.”Researchers like Papy stand by these claims. He views the FN303’s shattering projectile as extremely effective at preventing penetrative injury, even calling it “quite safe.”

He does cite one major caveat. “If the projectile reaches the head, you have a problem,” he says. The reason for this, Dr. Haar of PHR explains, is that because there is less fat and tissue to absorb impact on the head or face, the debris of hard plastic and bismuth from the shattering projectile have a much higher chance of penetrating. “Any projectile with metal or anything composite with metal is more harmful,” she says.

FN Herstal said in a statement that all of their documentation and training emphasize that the FN303 should never be aimed at the head or neck. They also mark every unit of the FN303 with a label warning against aiming the weapon above the shoulders.

But even so, shots to the head with impact projectiles continue and data show that the FN303 is particularly problematic in this realm. The “Charting the Crackdown” database logged 73 incidents of head shots across all weapon types. This includes 34 head shots from PepperBall launchers and six from the FN303. Though more common, PepperBall launchers were far less likely to cause penetrative injuries than FN303s. Less than 10 percent of head shots from PepperBalls caused lacerations, while five out of six from the FN303 penetrated the body, causing lacerations and sometimes blindings.

By looking for its unique injury profile of skin penetration coupled with bismuth pellets and plastic shards, researchers at the Human Rights Center identified 16 instances of severe injuries caused by the weapon since 2003. All save one involved a shot to the head. “The fact that two young people are either dead or blind from the same weapon 20 years apart means we failed in identifying this as a risk,” Haar said, underscoring a systemic problem.

In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the FN303 was used by police departments across the country. On May 29, 2020, a Georgia State Trooper using the FN303 shot and permanently disfigured the face of journalism student and filmmaker Mikaela Dyett, who was filming a protest in downtown Atlanta. Like Chervet, Dyett will live with the debris from the round embedded in her face for the rest of her life. During a protest in Portland, Oregon, on June 30, an independent journalist covering it was shot in the groin by an FN303.

His injury took over a month to heal. The following month, also in Portland, on July 25, 2020, a mother of three was shot in the forehead with the launcher, causing severe lacerations which required stitches.

A day later, on July 26, Portland-based journalist Trip Jennings was similarly shot. The round punctured the face shield of his gas mask, embedding pellets in his eyeball. Jennings had previously reported in the West Bank, where he had been hit with stun grenades, struck in the leg with a tear gas canister, and shot with pepperballs. “I got hit by all sorts of different munitions in the West Bank, and I can say very conclusively that this was the worst and most painful and longest impact,” Jennings recalled. The force of impact from the FN303 was so intense that he initially thought he had been hit by a shotgun shell.

In many of these cases—such as with Dyett and Jennings—the FN303 was not initially identified as the culprit.

For Scott Reynhout, a researcher who has spent the better part of a decade studying the use of crowd control weapons in protest settings with Physicians for Human Rights, this lack of awareness around the FN303’s potential for severe and even fatal injury is the clearest explanation for why it’s so dangerous.

“I was certainly guilty of failing to understand the nuances of this weapon in the past,” he admits. While working with PHR, he co-authored a study that cataloged injuries to the head and face caused by impact projectiles during the George Floyd protests in 2020. At the time, he made no distinction between this launcher and Pepperball guns. But six years later, in January 2026, as he began compiling a new database of crowd control weapon misuse, again with PHR, he saw a video of a DHS agent shooting 21-year-old Kaden Rummler in the eye at a demonstration in Santa Ana, California. At that point, he realized the FN303 was in a category of its own.

“It was something different, not just the severity of the injury, but also the types of injuries that you’re seeing,” Reynhout says. “If we think about the different types of less lethal weapons, there are a lot of different shapes and sizes, but not a lot of them can actually fit inside the orbit of the eye. Fewer still can fit inside the orbit of the eye and then carry enough energy with it to actually pass through the orbit and affect the brain.”Now working independently, Reynhout visited the bullet-casing littered ground of Jawbone Canyon to better understand how the launcher works and to collect data on its ballistic qualities.

This sun-baked valley located two hours outside of Los Angeles is commonly used as an improvised gun range by recreational shooters in the area. Crucially for Reynhout’s work, it’s a long, narrow canyon where he can set up targets up to 60 meters out without fear of striking passersby. His range consists of large cardboard and plywood targets to evaluate how far the projectiles drop over specific distance and doppler radars strategically placed to measure projectile velocity at the muzzle and at the target.

Reynhout extracts the FN303 from a large case and fires half a dozen rounds at a square of heavy-duty, reinforced plywood. The launcher makes a popping noise with each projectile, followed a split second later by a loud crack as the rounds collide with the wood. Shards of plastic explode outward. Even from 30 meters away, the dents are visible.

Almost immediately, the tests reveal the disparities with the claims made by FN Herstal. In the FN303 Armorer Training Manual from 2002, the only publicly available copy, the weapon is described as firing projectiles at 280-300 feet per second. In Reynhout’s testing, the velocity at the muzzle of the weapon reaches as high as 330 feet per second.

“The formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared,” Reynhout says. He explains that in layman’s terms this means that “even small changes in velocity can have an outsize effect on the kinetic energy.”Though the additional 30 feet per second difference he measured versus FN Herstal’s claims represents only a 10 percent increase in projectile velocity, they translate to a 21 percent increase in energy delivered to the target.

More concerning is the fact that the disparity in velocity is not a surprise to Alexandre Papy of the Belgian Royal Military Academy. He says that the FN303 can be tuned to fire at higher velocities and explains that because “it’s compressed air, it’s just a question of changing the pressure threshold.”Law enforcement agencies can even make this request of FN Herstal on an entire order of launchers. Meaning launchers used on the street may well exceed the specifications listed in manufacturer documentation. When asked about the velocity of their own launchers, Customs and Border Protection responded that their internal test showed projectiles traveling at the advertised 280-300 feet per second.

By examining the gap between a point of aim and puncture holes made by the launcher’s projectiles in sheets of cardboard, Reynhout’s testing confirms what is already known, that the FN303 does not fire projectiles in a straight line but in an arcing trajectory. The round initially travels upward, going higher than the point of firing, only dropping as it nears the target. By collecting this data, Reynhout can determine exactly how much officers must adjust their aim at specific distances.

When aiming at a subject 30 meters away, the rounds will hit more or less exactly where intended, which is known as being “zeroed.”Between the 40 and 50 meters, Reynhout found that the rounds start to drop precipitously, requiring the user to aim over a foot higher than the target they had intended to hit. This introduces “a pretty significant hazard that is completely dependent upon the individual who’s firing the weapon’s ability to accurately judge distance,” Reynhout notes. “Even if a police officer is doing their due diligence…there’s still the possibility that these weapons could go errant and therefore strike someone in a place where they should not be struck.”

Because it is a specialty weapon, proper use of the FN303 is not typically taught in general use-of-force training. Instead, law enforcement agencies can request an instructor certification course from FN Herstal. Once certified, these instructors then bring lessons learned back to their departments. Police insiders have noted that this is part and parcel of the specialty less lethal weapons industry.

According to police training practitioners and use of force experts, these manufacturer-led, weapons-specific trainings typically focus on how to assemble, operate, and repair the weapon. Issues around tactics, use of force standards, and procedure are considered to be matters of internal department policy for individual agencies to manage independently. According to a statement from FN Herstal, the manufacturer “provides equipment, training and technical support but does not determine operational policies, rules of engagement or use-of-force doctrines.”

When asked for details about their training program, FN Herstal stated that though their curriculum covers “deployment procedures, engagement distances and target selection, including repeated instructions on the areas that must not be targeted,” namely the head and neck, “operators remain bound by their agency’s use-of-force policy.”

“(Manufacturers) will sometimes offer model policies,” said Roy Taylor, a former police chief and expert witness in use of force cases, “but they will never tell the agency what they should or shouldn’t do. That’s outside their bailiwick.”For Thor Eells of the NTOA, the lack of standards in training creates a gap in the landscape for US law enforcement.

“We have this duty to make sure that people are thinkers. So we spend more time on the case law,” said Eells of the NTOA’s approach to training. But on the national level, “There is no standard. None. And in fact, in policing as a whole, there are little or no standards in the United States.”

When it comes to speciality launchers like the FN303, the baseline for training tends to come from the manufacturer. “Unless that specific agency or entity providing the training chooses to go above and beyond,” Eells explained, “then the training tends to be the minimum as put forth by the manufacturer.”

When asked about their training program for the FN303, DHS sent a reply from Customs and Border Protection. The agency stated that CBP agents are required to complete a qualification course and yearly recertification to be authorized to use the launcher. The course includes “classroom instruction, written and practical assessments, familiarization, use of force instruction, and qualification.”Agents are also instructed not to “target the head, neck, spine, or groin unless deadly force is reasonable and necessary.”

The content of FN Herstal’s curriculum is not publicly available. There are state-level institutions, such as the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, known as POST, which is a government agency that sets standards for local law enforcement agencies. It has the power to decertify officers for serious misconduct, and oversees general use of force training curricula. Nonetheless, manufacturer-led specialty weapons trainings lay outside the purview of agencies like POST. Meaning there is virtually no oversight on what manufacturer-trained instructors actually share with their departments.

After measuring the arc, precision, and velocity of the launcher, Reynhout sets up one final test of the FN303’s real power. He removes the cardboard target, now fully dotted with holes, and replaces it with a box of ballistics clay, a polymer clay of a particular consistency that is often used to measure the force of the impact of different weapons. The box is about three inches deep and open on one side. Reynhout explains that though the clay is a poor proxy for the human body, he is able to measure the craters that projectiles leave on its surface to compare the energy that they deliver at any given distance. It’s a “visual representation of the numbers that I’m presenting,” he says.

First, Reynhout takes aim with a paintball gun loaded with rubber balls, the exact size and weight of a standard PepperBall. The force of this shot, he explains, should be roughly equivalent to that of a PepperBall launcher—the weapon that law enforcement consistently conflates with the FN303.

He fires from a distance of about seven meters and hits his target. The small yellow ball makes a nearly one-inch deep indentation, before popping out and bouncing away through the desert.

Reynhout then aims the FN303. The loud pop of the weapon reverberates through the canyon. In an instant, a crater appears in the clay. The round has bored a hole all the way through to the back of the box. Shards of plastic and thousands of bismuth pellets coat the inside of the crater.

This weapon is no PepperBall launcher.

The Los Angeles Police Department frequently has turned to the FN303 when responding to anti-ICE demonstrations. As protests raged last June, sparked by ICE raids in the LA area, LAPD cracked down hard. The department deployed tear gas and fired thousands of rounds from less lethal weapons. Uses of the FN303 peaked in the 8-day period between June 6 and June 14, 2025, when the department reported firing 244 FN303 rounds in response to immigration related protests.

The LAPD periodically releases summarized reports to the public of their use of less lethal weapons and the injuries caused by their activities. These documents noted a total of 12 injuries from their activity during this period, but documentation did not specify which weapons caused these injuries.

By the end of January 2026, the LAPD had shot at least three journalists with the FN303 and seriously injured a woman with the weapon, causing severe lacerations to her face. She is now suing the department. Despite its repeated, sometimes dangerous misuses of the launcher, the LAPD continued its use in February. After a federal judge banned the department from using 40mm impact rounds in January, citing safety concerns, Chief Jim McDonnell announced at a Board of Police Commissioners meeting that the FN303 was an alternative option. The LAPD declined to answer any questions about the number of FN303s the department has in use, or to provide information about their training program for the launcher.

DHS, too, has leaned into the FN303, investing historic amounts in purchases of the weapon in September 2025. The effects of this DHS investment can be seen in the Trump administration’s crackdown on the recent surge of protests. Of the 12 incidents of FN303 misuse identified by the HRC and PHR team this past year, eight were perpetrated by federal agents working for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or the Federal Protective Service (FPS). Tucker Collins and his attorney, V. James DeSimone, filed a $100 million tort claim as a result of the injury DHS caused. Following the incident, DHS issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.

This surge of FN303 use has resulted in a new wave of injuries, many of which are permanent. Collins was not the only person who was partially blinded by DHS officers wielding the FN303 this year. In January, Kaden Rummler was shot in the eye from roughly three feet away by an FPS agent outside a federal building in Santa Ana. Video of the incident shows agents dragging Rummler across the concrete and into the facility to arrest him, blood pouring down his face. Like Collins, he will never again see out of his left eye.

The Federal Protective Service, the DHS subagency responsible for the injuries to both Collins and Rummler, follows a use of force policy that classifies any impact projectile fired at the neck or head as a use of deadly force. That same policy limits deadly force to extreme circumstances. “An FPS (officer) may use deadly force only when the (officer) has reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to the (officer) or to another person,” the policy manual states.

The Human Rights Center and Physicians for Human Rights identified five incidents in which people were shot in the head by federal officers using the FN303 over the past year, and one by LAPD. Along with Collins and Rummler, an 84-year-old woman, a 25-year-old woman, and two other unidentified victims suffered injuries of varying degrees after being struck in the head or face by a projectile from an FN303.

Outside of the US, injuries of the same severity were enough to trigger national conversations about whether the FN303 should be permitted at all. In the early 2000s and 2010s, Georgia, Turkey, and Switzerland all saw serious injuries, including blinding from FN303s being used in crowd control settings. The incidents prompted debates, and parliamentary sessions. Beyond the limited uproar following Victoria Snelgrove’s death, the FN303 has never been meaningfully scrutinized in the US.

Recent American use of the FN303 has sparked a new debate in FN Herstal’s home country of Belgium. Members of the right-wing New Flemish Alliance party, such as Defense Minister Theo Francken, have held up the LAPD’s use of the FN303 as aspirational. They argue that the weapon, which is heavily regulated in Belgium and rarely used in crowd control settings, should be deployed more broadly against left-wing protesters.

In October 2025, Francken travelled on a Belgian economic mission to California, where he, along with the CEO of FN Browning Julien Compère, Belgium’s Princess Astrid, and Los Angeles’ Deputy Police Chief Steve Embrich, had attended a demonstration of FN Herstal’s new generation FN303 Tactical at an LAPD firing range. The group was presented not only with an updated model of the launcher but also with an AI camera system mounted to the muzzle that automatically locks the trigger if it detects the user pointing at a face.

Days after his visit to the US, Francken posted to X advocating for use of the FN303 against Belgian protesters, “Extreme-left antifa mobs wrecked the entrance hall of the Immigration Service and injured multiple staff members…The police should deploy the FN303 against this scum, just like the LAPD, the police in Los Angeles, does.”

In Belgium, the use of the FN303 by law enforcement remains limited to special tactical units and is subject to approval from the Minister of the Interior, who is now Bernard Quintin. He has indicated he has no desire to change this anytime soon, telling journalists, “The use of FN303 is strictly regulated, and I want to keep it that way. There will be no change in the potential use of this weapon by police in policing protests.”

Rémy Farge is a researcher for the Belgian Human Rights League, a group that is advocating fiercely against any broader deployment of the FN303. In his opinion, “FN Herstal is making a sort of admission with the release of the ‘FN Smart Protector 303T,’ as if to cynically address the numerous cases of maiming and eye loss that these weapons have already caused.”As he sees it, the comparatively stringent regulations on less lethal weapons in Belgium fall far short of what is necessary. “If we take seriously the danger posed by this weapon,” he said, “then we must stop downplaying its effects and work toward reducing its use, particularly through stricter bans.”

Meanwhile, in the US, the FN303 remains in wide circulation, though it’s unclear exactly how wide. Each department at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels manages its own arsenal of approved weapons. With 18,000 police departments, before counting federal law enforcement agencies, the prospect of stronger standards regulating the use of a single weapon seems unlikely. As Reynhout points out, “The United States is not an ideal place to use the legislative cudgel to manage these weapons.”

For law enforcement, the decision of what to use then becomes a question of risk assessment and mitigation. “There is no magic threshold to say again, now that is lethal, that is non-lethal,” says Papy, “you can kill people with almost anything— including just your hands.”Despite the established comparison with the Pepperball launcher, there is another weapon that shares features with the FN303 whose history may prove instructive: the beanbag round. Like the FN303’s bismuth-filled ammunition, it is a less lethal projectile filled with metal fragments. In this case, a kevlar sack filled with lead pellets.

These beanbags were used widely during the 2020 George Floyd protests, causing severe injuries by embedding in people’s bodies and cracking skulls. Since then, Reynhout notes, law enforcement has shifted away from using these projectiles, which caused so much harm six years ago. The data support his claim. The database compiled by Physicians for Human Rights and the Berkeley Human Rights Center found only one misuse of a beanbag round in over 400 incidents recorded from June 2025 through May 2026. But the question remains, why?

“To my knowledge, there wasn’t any sort of legislation that specifically targeted beanbag rounds that was passed,” says Reynhout “yet police departments of their own volition seem to have come to the same conclusion that we came to, that the risk is unacceptable.”That assessment of risk doesn’t come on its own. For Haar of PHR, it comes down to public understanding of the dangers of the use of the FN303. “I think that’s kind of the goal,” she says. “You just got to push against it and increase the cost of buying that.”If that happens, then perhaps the FN303 could quietly go the way of the bean bag.