Police arrested a Bushwick man who allegedly had a used rocket launcher in his Knickerbocker Avenue apartment.
Working off a tip, Cops got a warrant to search the apartment between Covert and Shaefer streets, where they found the round pipe rocket launcher, along with drug paraphernalia, according to NYPD spokeswoman Sophia Mason.
The rocket launcher was a one-time use instrument and had already been used, said Mason. She said police do not know where or when the weapon was fired.
The 83rd Precinct’s Twitter feed referred to the rocket launcher as a “WMD” or weapon of mass destruction, but several Twitter users scoffed at that, including a user named Crypto Cuttlefish, who said “a disposable rocket launcher without the rocket is just a tube that you can buy from Army surplus shop.”
Most Army Navy surplus stores in Brooklyn do not sell the dodgy instrument, according to Ed Veneziano, owner of Cato’s Army Navy on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint.
“I do not sell that, and none of the vendors I work with sell anything remotely like that,” said Veneziano.
Still, Veneziano said it might be possible to find such an object at Army-Navy stores in other states.
“Try Texas,” he said. “If you can buy it, you can buy it in Texas.”
So we called some Texas Army-Navy store to see if that was the case, and learned it might not. But other non-working explosives could be found.
“Those are very, very hard to find,” said Case Smien, who works at the City Surplus Army Navy Store in Killeen, Texas. “If we did sell one, we would assume it was no longer functional, like the old grenades we sell.”
Police charged the 41-year-old man with criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of drug paraphernalia.
