France just banned stun grenades after a teenager lost a hand

France just pulled stun grenades off the streets around its schools.

A 15-year-old lost a hand. A 14-year-old lost several teeth. Both hit by police weapons during student protests.

So France's interior minister made a call.

Laurent Nunez went on the radio station RTL this morning and said it himself. He's suspending stun grenades for the high school protest movement. Only that movement. Only until investigators work out what happened.

Here's what happened to those two teenagers.

Two days ago, in the northern city of Lens, police fired a stun grenade. A 15-year-old lost a hand. Separately, a 14-year-old student in northwest Paris was hit in the face by a tear gas grenade at close range. He lost several teeth. A police officer has been charged over that one.

Nunez says quote "suspending their use until the facts are clarified".

So think about that for a second. France's own interior minister is pulling a weapon off the streets while his own police are still under investigation for how they used it.

And this didn't come out of nowhere.

Students have been blocking entrances to hundreds of high schools since late last month. Dilapidated buildings. Teacher shortages. Not enough funding. Most of the schools affected teach 15- to 17-year-olds.

This week brought the biggest day yet. Students and supporters marched across France. Al Jazeera says hundreds of thousands turned out. Other outlets say it was tens of thousands. Either way, parents, teachers and union workers joined them in Paris and other cities. And accusations were flying that police were using disproportionate force against minors.

That evening, President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu and other ministers sat down to try to calm things down.

But Lecornu isn't taking all the blame.

He told lawmakers the violence would not be tolerated. And he rejected accusations that the government had ordered what critics are calling police repression. The government's line is that outsiders hijacked the movement and turned it into urban violence. It's pointed the finger at the hard-left France Unbowed party for stoking tensions.

France Unbowed isn't backing down either.

Manuel Bompard, the party's national coordinator, says quote "it took several children being maimed for Nunez to give up the grenades".

That's the opposition saying this ban only happened because children got hurt badly enough to force it.

Now the numbers. And there are a lot of them.

Lecornu's office says more than 700 police officers have been hurt. More than 200 teenagers have been hurt too. France's Interior Ministry says 6,100 people have been arrested since the protests began. Some other outlets put that figure higher, over 6,500. The Ministry of Justice says more than 1,800 people are being prosecuted, including 1,483 minors. It hasn't said what they're accused of.

Police have opened 18 internal investigations into misconduct since the protests started.

Lecornu is due to give a public address later today, on the school protests and on the country's finances.

So what happens next?

Nobody knows yet. Nunez gave no end date for the suspension. It isn't clear if this leads to wider changes in police tactics or more money for schools. Neither Lecornu nor Macron has said anything directly about the stun grenade decision itself.

For now, the grenades are gone from the streets around French schools. Whether anything else changes is still wide open.