Based on the following story, perhaps administrators of student exchange programs should focus more effort on explaining the complexities of campus gun rules for their charges.

Two Chinese students at La Roche College in Pennsylvania are facing criminal charges for shooting a toy gun on campus.

Haotian Liu and Dixiaonan Zhou brought a pellet gun to the campus and shot it. They incident happened around 3:30 p.m. Monday, WPXI.com reported. Although no one was hit, the Chinese students violated the school’s weapon ban.

Liu and Zhou are facing possession of a weapon on school property and disorderly conduct charges. The school is also considering expelling the Chinese students, which could force them to leave the United States, Campus Reform reported.

“They would probably work with their embassy to see what their options would be,” Dean of Students Colleen Ruefle told Campus Reform. “It could mean that they would have to go home to their countries.”

Ruefle said she does not know for sure how an expulsion would impact the students’ visa status because she is not sure about the exact terms of their visas.

A student who saw the two students with the pellet gun called the police.

“He saw that they had shot the gun and realized it was a pellet gun and came to report that,” Ruefle told a local CBS affiliate.

When questions, Liu and Zhou insisted they were simply “playing” with the gun, but the McCandless Police Department pressed charges anyway.

“They represented to us that they viewed the guns as just being toys, in fact they weren’t,” McCandless Police Chief Gary Anderson told the CBS affiliate. “They were active weapons, in the sense of pellet guns, can do some bodily damage – no question about that – and they were just fooling around with the toy guns.”

Liu and Zhou have been in the United States for two years.

School officials plan to talk to the two students and find out why they had the guns.