I had to scratch my head for a moment to see if it was an April Fools' joke (it was posted 4 days later). Regular police investigative techniques can disambigu

I had to scratch my head for a moment to see if it was an April Fools' joke (it was posted 4 days later). Regular police investigative techniques can disambiguate intent of (an) individual(s) by searching their items and questioning their plans. Someone LARPing isn't going to play act with live ordinance, contagious pathogens, or actual firearms. They may well carry swords, but then they'd also be wearing padded armor. I think it's up to a judge or jury to decide if the Free Staters of Terrorism were committing terrorism or not in highly-suspicious, ambiguous circumstances. Leaping to the deep-end of paranoia about mostly innocent play would create a society with a corrosive, suspicious attitude. Now an awful thought: Although it seems a weird and terrible idea, I could imagine a group of kids going somewhere hopefully unoccupied and unlikely to be patrolled by police LARPing as terrorists, school shooters, or any other taboo archetype. For the record, a dying (and now late) friend of mine was once violently arrested in a parking lot for playing Ingress in Los Altos, CA.