: When I was in high school, I painted a gun black to be used as a prop for a
: film. We let the police know just in case anybody came by, saw, and called
: it in, and they said it was cool since it was on private property (doing
: it in public would require a cop to actually be there at the shoot, which
: you'd have to pay for). During shooting however, some punk kid came in and
: started harassing us. He stole the fake gun and ran away. We chased him,
: and though we lost him. We kept looking and found him, and no joke, he was
: using it to hold up some lady and trying to take her stuff.

: There's a reason fake guns are fake colors.

Yeah freshman year we made a (hilariously bad) mob film too. We took tracer guns from the hardware store and spray-painted them, but we never bothered telling anyone, we just shoot our stuff on the streets or along the bike paths along with our homes. Given the sheer number of us involved in shooting and the fact that we lived in a pretty affluent neighborhood I'm not particularly surprised we didn't get in trouble or that anyone freaked out, but I wonder if it would have been worse now. At the least I don't think the hardware store carries anything that could even be spray-painted into a reasonable-looking gun at this point, so it's a pretty far cry from the days as a kid I could get a black machine gun toy (and top it off with candy cigarettes.)