[dakota.potts]

At around that same age, I played airsoft with my friends. We all had our automatic rifles and most of us had some kind of pistol. We dressed in whatever BDU we could scrounge together at Army/Navy stores and played wherever we could find enough woods.

I had to do a bunch of research to convince my parents to let me play and one of the things that surprised me was how common these incidents were. Yeah, ours all had the blaze orange tip (mine was the entire flash hider of my MP5) but I don't expect someone to see that from a distance or the heat of the moment. One thing that was drilled into my head on airsoft forums was "If the cops are called and tell you to put your weapon down, don't talk or tell them it's fake. If you're holding your $1200 SystemA authentic reproduction M4 training rifle and they tell you to drop it, you drop the sucker on the ground as fast as you can and put your hands up." Who knows if this is what happened? Maybe they ordered and he didn't hear them or he froze up out of fear.

I also knew a couple of kids from a local high school who were arrested after they climbed onto a billboard and pointed their airsoft rifles at cars, but that's an entirely different stupidity.