02/17/2026
PSA- to genuine ai***ft players, long read, but please read:
Our sport/hobby is shrinking, we already have a lot of rules and restrictions put on us as toy gun owners. Actions like this, where genuine criminals get ahold of ai***ft guns makes our entire community look bad. Incidents like this could make the people and the government want to write more rules and restrictions, none of us want that.
Does it look a little comedic to have a photo line up of a bunch of toy guns, sure it does. But put yourself in the officers shoes for one second. Just one. The guy rammed a cop car and has commited crimes with the toys. The appeal to ai***ft vs paintball is the realism, making our replicas look real, to simulate war (military simulation, milsim games) essentially to play pretend battle. If you were an officer looking at a brandished ai***ft in a job that is life/death, you choose the actions that protect the masses (and yourself) and treat the threat as what it is, a threat. Only once the threat is gone can you take a moment to understand and examine what you have seized...a bunch of toys. Was the officer wrong to treat THIS INSTANCE like a threat? No period.
Reading a lot of the comments where people are laughing about how these are "only ai***ft guns" is sad. The man who did this was committing crimes, burglaries, and attacked a officer with the car. He was completely in the wrong and the officer did the right thing in this instance. Rather than showing the public that our comminuty doesn't take this seriously because they are "only ai***ft," we should all be pointing out that we don't claim this criminal as one of us.
Our industry is always under scrutiny, it is our job as participants of ai***ft to treat our replicas with respect and to always keep in mind that they look REAL to the average person. Pulling out your replica in a non-ai***ft designated area is brandishing, that is a crime in many places, especially here in California. Do not take them out in public for any reason other than for a game in an authorized ai***ft space. Do not bring them out for Halloween, do have them out in your front yard, and you even need to be careful in your backyard, if you make a neighbor feel threatened by practicing in your backyard and they don't know it is fake, you can be in trouble that way too.
We care for the ai***ft community and ask that you not go seeking attention like this. Do not draw negative attention to ai***ft. Do not try to replicate this scene with the police cars and armored vehicles, this could have ended very badly for everyone involved, especially if there was even one real one in the car anywhere. Many ai***fters participate in real-steel activities, use common sense please do not have both in your car at the same time.
We ask that you keep them at home when not in use. Leaving them in you car is both bad for the plastics and rubber components, but also increases their chances of being stollen and later used in criminal activities such as this incident.
Thank you.
Good job APD and GGPD
