Last night on Fox News, anchor Megyn Kelly joined Bill O’Reilly to assess just how much the protesters at UC Davis deserved to get pepper-sprayed while staging a nonviolent protest last week. “First of all, pepper spray — that just burns your eyes, right?” O’Reilly asks Kelly, the legal (and apparently chemical) expert. “It’s like a derivative of actual pepper,” she responds. “It’s a food product, essentially.”

According to Kelly, some people are wondering if the UC officers’ spray had been “diluted.” O’Reilly concurred: “They should have had more of a reaction than that.” In actuality, the spray appears to be of the MK-9 stream canister variety, at 0.7 percent strength, with a possible range of 18–20 feet and a minimum recommended distance of six feet. Kelly agrees that the attack appears to be “abrasive and intrusive” and that the tape “looks bad,” but doesn’t believe the officers technically did anything wrong.

One of the hit protesters told Boing Boing two days later, “I still have a burning sensation in my throat, lips and nose, especially when I start coughing, or when I’m lying in bed. Everyone who got sprayed has sustained effects like this.” Sounds delicious.