What not to do!

[MrCrowley]

And filming it was essentially the dumbest thing these kids could have done.

The 2nd dumbest thing, I would say. The dumbest was actually retaliating in the first place. If they'd reported it to the police, that would have been much more sensible.
Spudfiles can't do anything about morons like that, but we get the bad rap for it.

However, I will say that paintball guns are very useful at Halloween.
We had problems with egging and flour one year, which had actually done damage to the house - so the next year I borrowed a set of simple paintball markers from a friend - and, lo and behold, the punks turned up again.
I think it was a group of relatively young teenagers trying to be "hard" - Thing was, they weren't expecting a trio of young adults to burst out of the door, chuck paintball flash-bangs at them and fire paint at them. Unsurprisingly, they legged it, and we never had problems from them again.

It was quite fun really. BTW, it wasn't retaliation, it was just defence, and we had deliberately chronoed the markers at around about a low 200 fps for safety reasons, so don't whinge at me about it being immature and dangerous.

Wasn't there someone on UKSGC who hid in the bush with a copper pneumatic, sniper styles and gained similar revenge?

Or was that you?

[paaiyan]

It was quite fun really. BTW, it wasn't retaliation, it was just defence, and we had deliberately chronoed the markers at around about a low 200 fps for safety reasons, so don't whinge at me about it being immature and dangerous.

Psh. I'da turned the thing up. Give em a nice baseball-sized welp, that'll teach em.

[Ragnarok]

Psh. I'da turned the thing up. Give em a nice baseball-sized welp, that'll teach em.

You have to consider those people weren't wearing goggles (although they did have "Scream" masks, those are not ballistic rated), so it was pretty important that the velocity was kept low, because if they turned up back at home having lost an eye (we were deliberately aiming away from the face though, but PB markers are notoriously inaccurate), then I'd have had angry parents trying to prosecute me.

If they sustained a bruise or two, they weren't going to tell their parents they got shot with paintball guns - because mummy and daddy would then find out they were trying to egg a house. If they lost an eye, then they would have had to have said something.

@MrC: No, that wasn't me, I think that was Spanerman.