Florida Man Shoots Gun at Teenagers Playing Pokemon Go Outside His House

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Dammit, world, why can’t we have nice things? Pokemon Go is a nice thing. It’s just a fun little game that gets people out of their houses chasing digital bits of 90s nostalgia. But because we are living in the prologue of a dystopian sci-fi novel, two teenagers reportedly looking for cartoon animals were shot at by a Florida man last night.

According to The Orlando Sentinel, the two teenagers were in a parked car at around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday. They were out looking for Pokemon and had stopped to catch a Marowak and a Tauros. A 37-year-old man who lived in the neighborhood reportedly heard a noise and looked out his window, and when he saw the car he became instantly suspicious, so he grabbed his handgun and ran outside.

He said that as he approached the car he heard one teenager say, “Did you get anything?” So he assumed they had just robbed someone, maybe him. He then said he ran in front of their car, leveled his gun at them, and told them not to move, as though he were a police officer.

The terrified teenagers, who were just in the car looking for Pokemon–one had asked the other if he’d caught the Marowak, hence the: “Did you get anything?”–decided not to stay and see what the man with the gun was going to do to them, and the one in the driver’s seat drove the car away as fast as he could.

The man with the gun then fired several shots at the car as it sped away. He told police that the car had “was attempting to strike him,” as though he weren’t the guy who had decided to stand immediately in front of a car and point a gun at people.

In an unusual stroke of good luck for a 2016 news story, the teenagers were OK. The next day the teenagers’ mother called police and said her 19-year-old and 16-year-old had been playing Pokemon Go on their phones when a man came out of a house and started shooting at them in the street.

Police are reportedly still investigating.

Be careful out there. Pokemon Go is a fun game, but the world can be a dangerous place full of fast-moving cars, holes you can step in, and people with guns who think you’re up to no good.

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