When my son was in college, his fraternity played this assassin game. Armed with water guns, they'd target other players and if you hit them, you won that round and moved on until only one was left standing. He had a blast.
This was on a college campus and the frat restricted the grounds to there. Everyone knew what was happening and it was all in good fun, but with all things, there need to be some sensible limits. When there isn't, things can happen.
Unfortunately, that recently happened when a group of high schoolers weren't that careful.
An off-duty agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement shot a high school student in the arm last week during a pre-dawn game of "Senior Assassins," the Nassau County Sheriff's Office said.
In the game, players carry fake guns such as water pistols, conceal their identities, run through areas, and hide in obscure places, Fox News said. The object is to tag or shoot other players, authorities said.
Florida State Attorney Melissa Nelson said the game is gaining popularity among high school students across northern Florida and throughout the country, the cable network added.Sheriff Bill Leeper said the FDLE agent in question encountered what appeared to be three prowlers outside the agent's residence on Purple Martin Drive in Yulee just before 6 a.m. Wednesday.
Immediately following the shooting, the off-duty agent began administering first aid, the sheriff's office said. Arriving investigators discovered the wounded individual was an 18-year-old Bishop Kenny High School student. The school is in Jacksonville, which is in Duval County, but the sheriff's office said the "target" of the game was a fellow student who lives in Nassau County.
The wounded student's injuries were not life-threatening, the sheriff's office said.
'Potentially deadly situation'
“These types of games may seem innocent, but when you have young people sneaking around in the dark carrying objects that could be mistaken for weapons, you're creating a potentially deadly situation,” Leeper said.
Leeper cautioned people about playing the game. Nelson noted that players have been injured or killed by people not recognizing that this isn't a real threat.
The reason is that many of these kids aren't playing with the brightly-colored water guns we might hand our children for a fun day outside in the summer. They're disguising them in some way, probably to not give away that someone is there. The pic in the above-linked article doesn't look much like a real firearm, all things considered, but that's with all the time in the world to see it as it's lying on the ground. With it in someone's hands, in the early morning hours before the sun is over the horizon? It'll sure look real enough.
Officials say parents need to have a talk with their kids about why games like this are a bad idea.
I can't say they're wrong.
Look, it actually does sound fun and my friends and I did stuff that makes this look tame back in the day, all without incidents. A friend of mine would get with the kids in his neighborhood, go to the woods, and have BB gun wars and those look a whole lot more like real firearms. Hell, there was a film with Anthony Edwards called Gotcha about a college kid who essentially this game, but with paintball guns played on a college campus.
But just because we got away with it doesn't mean it was smart.
On the same token, I want to know just how the agent handled the situation. Did he order them to drop the gun and they pointed it at him as a reflex? Or did he just see a gun-shaped object and start blasting? Those are valid questions and they dictate a lot of where we go from here.
If he just shot because he saw a gun, we have a problem.
If they turned and pointed it at him, we have a different problem. In that case, people need to know that when the police tell you to drop something, drop it and then you can sort it out after the fact.
If it was the former, well, that's something that needs to be handled differently.
