courtesy popularmechanics.com

“It is an absolute waste of police resources. Most of our officers went out there because it is a serious incident.” So scolded Marc Lovicott, University of Wisconsin campus police spokesman. What had the Madison cops’ mouthpiece in a DEFCON 1 tizzy? Bomb threat? Plague? Almost. From channel3000.com: “Police blame a modern game of tag called ‘Humans Versus Zombies’ for wasting public safety resources this week after two reports of gun calls tied to the competition.” The UW po-po got not one, but two 911 calls, one of which reporting an automatic weapon. This, despite the gamers alerting campus police in advance that they’d be playing. “‘I wouldn’t think that any of the Nerf blasters would confuse anyone for a real weapon, because most of the new ones are bright yellow or blue,’ said Steven Brandt, a UW freshman on the zombie team.” So Madison’s scholars and great minds of tomorrow managed to confuse Day-glo, primary colored sponge-shooters with actual gats. Maybe this should have been one of our ‘This is What Happens to a Disarmed Populace’ pieces.

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62 COMMENTS

  2. I don’t imagine anyone was confused. It seems more likely someone on campus thought the game was “insensitive” and called the police to break it up.

    As cops won’t respond to issues like misdemeanour offensiveness, one CAN get them to come out by reporting “man with gun”.

    Problem solved, if you’re a complete tool.

    • DA-Dan nailed it. Libs don’t like people shooting at one another, even if it is with foam darts.

      • Oh, please – what’s really going on is that folks looking out their windows see what looks like someone being shot and killed. If there weren’t quite so many guns in the hands of criminals and crazy people, the average citizen wouldn’t be quite so concerned.

        What a pity that the gun worshippers of America won’t allow simple safety regulations to be enacted because they don’t trust government with that information.

        On a side note, the House of Representatives just passed a bill that allows telecommunications and Internet service providers to freely share information with the federal government without notifying their customers – and the government can search the data without a warrant.

        “Rogers and his allies defeated a series of privacy-protective amendments, including one (PDF) that would have required Homeland Security or other agencies to obtain warrants before searching this database of shared information for evidence of criminal activity. Another unsuccessful amendment (PDF) that would have made Internet companies’ promises to protect customer privacy legally enforceable.” (Source: CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57580583-38/film-war-for-web-warns-of-cispa-sopa-future-threats/)

        If you’re really worried about the government using a list of gun owners as a tool to seize your guns – worry about CISPA.

        • Some one being shot and killed with a nerf gun? How butt hurt are you at the senate defeat of the civil rights violation bill that you had to make that leap, Repub?

        • Speaking only for myself, CISPA worries me a whole lot more than the thought that someone might be carrying a gun somewhere (Nerf or otherwise). And it worries me almost exactly as much as the government trying to make it impossible for peaceful, law-abiding people to keep and carry guns (Nerf or otherwise).

        • Sweet, sweet statist tears. Keep crying that your bill to oppress other people’s freedoms got shot down. Then FOAD.

        • Also, I’m confused. You tell us to trust the government, then point out a way the government plans to be intrusive and oppressive.

          Typical leftist. So many contradictions.

        • More regulations like Guns being illegal on campus? People should have known it wast real, it’s illegal to have the guns there, the signs say so! (Sarcastic Font). You sound like a troll.

        • Hey smart one. There is already a common sense gun law on the books. It’s called the second amendment. It’s all the gun law a free and civilized country needs. Shall not be infringed means shall not be infringed. FOAD

        • It’s not one or the other. CISPA is a huge concern, but so is the erosion of the 2nd Amendment.

          The constitution isn’t a a la carte platter. Every part is important.

      • Repub, so many criminals have guns, which must be why the crime rate has been falling for years. Maybe you should turn off the news once in a while and actually look up facts, for once. Occasional mass shootings =/= ermahgerd all the bad guys have guns!1!!!!!11!1!!1!

      • “Libs don’t like people shooting at one another, even if it is with foam darts.”

        Historically, leftists are the most violent people on the planet and love shooting other people. It’s why they self-project their violence onto normal citizens and call for gun control, because they think everyone’s as untrustworthy with guns as they are. They’re absolutely fine with violence, so long as the violence is directed at people they don’t like.

        Wait for the first instance of SWAT murdering an entire family of “tea partiers” and see how many leftists cry.

    • Yep, it’s liberal-progressive passive-aggressive tactics. It’s simply “SWATTING” and the culprits are hoping somebody gets hurt or killed.

    • I live on 16 acres with the nearest neighbor 1200 feet away. One morning I went out to loose a few Mauser rounds at some targets at the base of a 400 foot high hill so steep you are on hands and knees half the time going up it. And what did I see? Three sheriffs deputies. Said the idiot neighbor down the hill had called in automatic weapon fire. On a Mauser! A few days later, he did the same thing again, this time one deputy showed up, and said the neighbor knew it wasn’t a machine gun, but also knew that nothing short of that would get the popo out. It takes 15 minutes just to get to the freeway and another 15 to get to the sheriff’s substation, and probably 25 more to get to the main sheriff’s office.

      • Suggest that the next time the neighbor does it, they should inform him that making false 911 calls is an arrestable offense.

        • They told him that, but told me that arguing he should have recognized the difference between a Mauser and a machine gun is not likely to win the prosecutor’s favor, that it would take dozens of calls in a day. Nevertheless, he hasn’t called in again in two years.

  3. Are people really that dumb that they can’t tell a Nerf blaster from a real firearm? I played HvZ one semester at UMass Lowell and we never had any problems. If it wasn’t a problem in MA I’m kind of surprised that it was a problem elsewhere.

    • They really are that dumb. We can’t even play HvZ at my university because our Department of Residential Programs and Services threatened to classify NERF blasters as “weapons” along with the already-banned paintball gun, airsoft guns, and any plastic replica guns if we proceeded in having a game. So, despite the go-ahead from campus security and the office of student safety, we couldn’t do it.

    • As a gun loving guy from NORTHERN Wisconsin, I can say for a FACT that the idiots in Madison will stop at no lie to small or large when it comes to guns.

  4. Yeah, it’s the same here in Milwaukee, I was messing around with friends in the dorms with the Nerf guns he brought from home and a RA came by and saw us and he had all of the Nerf guns confiscated because according to the student handbook, they are classified as a weapon. I don’t remember if we had them in our human vs zombie run.

  5. After I learned yesterday that one needs an FOID in New Jersey to buy a BB gun, nothing can surprise me any more.

    • try your local walmart too, I collect some of the cooler Nerf toys, and I can tell you that the dart shooters are disappointing, but the disc shooters are awesome to play around with.

  7. This is played in /Canada/ with no issues afaik. It’s not the games’ fault, it’s people being stupid.

  8. This bogus raid happened on campus? That figures. People who think that the Soviet Union fell have never been to an American university. The typical professor thinks that Bill Ayers is the soul of America but George Washington was a running-dog capitalist oppressor who stole the milk from the babies of the oppressed peasants and workers.

  9. I think we need to immediately push for CCLs for NERF! If this is going to lead to a NERF dart ammo shortage, I am gonna be pissed.

  10. How the hell in this day and age could anyone not know that was a toy. I cannot comprehend the lack of intelligence our society has anymore. Even if they knew it was a toy and decided to call police because they personally hate all forms of guns…are we that far gone as a society that we let some idiot or mini Bloomberg dictate a freaking nerf gun?!

    • Those people to whom you refer are ASLEEP; they just go through the motions, cradle to grave. Their life is but a dream; merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily….

    • “are we that far gone as a society that we let some idiot or mini Bloomberg dictate a freaking nerf gun?!” Yip and sadly, term that comes to mind is candy asses.

      • Sorry to the female ttag readers out there but I think the progressives just want us all the wear a dress, paint our nails and tuck our nuts between our legs

    • First, never underestimate the idiocy of the PC moonbats at UW. Second, yeah, they knew it was a toy gun. The mass freakouts over pop tarts, Hello Kitty bubble guns, and now Nerf guns are part of the plan to create fear/hysteria over guns

  11. We had a few games like this at William and Mary. Never had any trouble about it, though. It was an official student organization that met every other Saturday night in a randomly scheduled academic building. The only restriction on us was that we were told by campus police to conceal our terrifying and obsessively-modified dart-shooters in backpacks when walking across campus.

    Of course, there was also the guy in my dorm that brought a hunting bow, and practiced on a tree out back. I’m still surprised that no one freaked out about it. Nothing happened to the guy as far as I know. Despite this, he somehow managed to not murder everyone.

  12. Another day in bizarro America. The supposed “halls of academia” are inhabited by society’s most ignorant, evil, and destructive creatures. As an intelligent and conservative student, my four years in college were hell. I was surrounded by more rational, reasonable, and intelligent people when I visited my niece’s pre-school class.

    To paraphrase someone in a previous post, colleges truly are leftist seminaries.

    • If you went to college during the Vietnam War as I did, you’d know that American universities aren’t leftist seminaries, they’re Marxist cathedrals.

  14. Here’s another university story for you:
    During the 1930s, prominent science-fiction writer Issac Asimov attended one of the Ivy League schools and lived in a house with three other science-fiction friends from school. Being young males they would do things such as don elaborate sci-fi outfits and duel with each other using fencing swords on their front yard.

    One day the FBI armed with shotguns and Thompsons raided their house based on suspicion that the group of geeky friends were dangerous communist sympathizers and subversives. Nothing came of it and no one was prosecuted.

    Moral of the story: there are over-reactive, intolerant, and extremist oppressors on the far Left and far Right.

  15. It’s not always that bad in Madison. While there ARE idiots there who can’t tell nerf guns from real guns, in my neighborhood there I used to see people playing around in their front yards all the time with airsoft guns that (at a distance) I couldn’t tell apart from the real thing. Police never got called in as long as I can remember .

  16. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Thank heaven they weren’t Hello Kitty Bubble Guns. Someone could have gotten hurt.

  17. We played this at BYU in UT, we had NERF guns walking across campus and never had a problem, we played where the game went on 24/7 so some people always had them. This is a fairly conservative campus though

  19. You people need to read between the lines… they knew the guns were not real!!! They called because of the ZOMBIES OMG OMG THERE WERE ZOMBIES!!!!!!

  20. There’s been ongoing games here in even “liberal” Seattle on the University of Washington campus. Hasn’t been a problem, and it’s a good way for the college kids to blow off steam. Wish they had something like this when I was an undergrad!

    http://www.uwhvzt.com/

    • Oh, that sounds awesome… Makes me wish I were 20 years younger. They picked a great part of campus to have the game.

  21. Oh man… and I keep a nerf rifle and blaster at my desk at work, just in case. Hope I don’t start a panic now.

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