What began Saturday night in Boca Raton, Florida, as a seemingly harmless photo shoot for an upcoming comics convention, quickly turned into a tense confrontation with police.
According to Boca Raton Police Chief Dan Alexander, concerned residents approached two officers to report they saw four or five people donning body armor and taking guns from the trunk of a car. The cops immediately rushed to the top floor of a nearby parking garage, where they found five men in "military-style outfits" brandishing firearms; one had two samurai swords strapped to his back. You can see some of their weapons and gear, including a Deadpool mask, in the photos above.
The officers ordered the young men to the ground at gunpoint, and quickly discovered the suspected terrorists were actually cosplayers brandishing prop weapons. They were issued trespassing citations and sent on their not-so-merry way, Alexander says, "with some words of wisdom.""Some folks are getting carried away in their quest for the next great social media post," he writes on his blog. "Someone is going to get hurt."
If this scenario seems vaguely familiar, it's because in May, police in Jefferson City, Missouri, responded to 911 calls about gunmen at movie theater. It turned out they were costumed actors hired by the theater's manager to promote Iron Man 3.