Ladysmith brothers playing with airsoft guns prompts heavy RCMP presence

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WATCH: Brothers playing with airsoft guns that look like riffles prompts RCMP response in Cassidy, just North of Ladysmith.  Isabelle Raghem reports. 

Tylor and Karl Lofstrom have been playing with airsoft guns for years,  but say their hobby has never led to a response by RCMP.

An RCMP helicopter, am Emergency Response Team and a canine unit were all dispatched to Cassidy, a small town north of Ladysmith Wednesday evening after reports of two men with rifles.  

“[We] came home from a normal day of airsoft and maybe half hour after, there was cops all over Cassidy,” Tylor, 23, said. 

The Lofstrom brothers said instead of taking their usual route through a field to get back home, they walked on a more populated road that evening to get more shade. That’s when they say they passed a man who asked if the guns were real. They told him they were airsoft guns and passed him one so he could try it out for himself. They believe that man was who called police. 

“[The officers] were all geared up, they had a canine unit, they were fully prepared for what was going to happen and we asked right away if they were looking for us and they said yeah. So we got a good lecture on what happened and why we shouldn’t be on the roads with our guns. It was pretty intense,” Eighteen-year-old Karl said. 

Ladysmith RCMP could not be reached for comment Friday, but the brothers say they were advised to be more discrete in the future.

The Lofstrom brothers say they won’t stop playing the sport. They said they will put up warning signs in the future and will carry their guns in bags to and from the forests in which they play.

Isabelle RaghemIsabelle Raghem

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