Ultimately, this was in extremely poor taste, and whoever was in charge should be fired for their lack of judgement in doing this as part of a school event at a public game. That said, given the state of modern US policing, the legal realities around citizen interactions with police, and the fact that US police kill people at a rate orders of magnitude higher than that of other developed nations (Kern county alone shoots and kills about as many people a year as the entire nation of Germany does), it's not hard to see where this sort of thing comes from, and the demand for "respect" for law enforcement becomes increasingly harder to swallow.
I'm also amused at the article labelling the faux-guns as "ar15 style" when they appear to be MP5s. What's more, had I brought a fake gun like that on campus during my
HS days, at this point now ~15 years ago, i'd have been expelled immediately and probably arrested
Even the color-guard rifles were just vaguely gun shaped wood stocks wrapped completely in bright white tape that werent allowed to be carried around campus.