Fake News: NowThis Claims Child is Waving Gun in Senate Candidate Video

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Online media Publication NowThis, with millions of followers across multiple social media platforms, released some #FakeNews claiming the child of US Senate Candidate Joey Gibson from Washington state was waving a gun around in a video. Gibson is also a leader of the conservative group Patriot Prayer.

Check out their claim below:

Based on NowThis’s caption narrative of the video, they clearly believe that Gibson’s son is waving around a fully functioning firearm. There’s just one problem with this claim. The gun is clearly a toy.

Sure, it may look real enough in a life or death scenario that if someone was pointing this at you, you’d likely fire at them. This isn’t one of those scenarios, however. NowThis had every opportunity to examine the video, or at the very least refer the video to someone who knew something (or anything) about guns to determine the authenticity of the gun in the video. That’s not what happened here, however.

Anyone who has ever held a rifle before let alone one as bulky as this one, would know if this were a real rifle and not a piece of plastic, this below screen capture from the video simply would not be possible.

A child this small would not be able to hold this rifle up with one hand if it were real, nor would he be able to handle it as effortlessly as he does throughout the video. Common sense should dictate this as well, for people who are so bent on common sense gun control.

Next I will show you the other side of the gun so you will have seen it from both angles. Again, look how effortlessly this is being held up with one hand, straight up and down which would be concentrating the entire gun’s weight into his hand with no distribution. His grip isn’t even firm.

There is one more thing I would like to point out about the above photos. As many of our readers are mobile, the pictures may be too small for this to be clearly defined. So I’m going to zoom in on the gun in portrait mode.

Zoomed Image:

Those of you who know guns know that they are made up of many moving parts. However everything is flush with no definition. As you can probably see, even the magazine is completely flush with the rest of the gun. In other words, the entire body of this gun is a single piece of plastic.

NowThis which has an audience in the millions getting this so incredibly wrong not only borders on defamation, but also carries the possibility of real damages as they’ve likely enticed their followers to anonymously report Gibson to CPS.

But the good news is, NowThis has officially disqualified themselves from ever being taken seriously on the topic of guns ever again. This was so incredibly verifiable that they are either dishonest or completely inept. If they were inept, they could have reached out to Gibson or anyone who has ever held a gun in their life, but they didn’t even do that. NowThis has shown to millions of people that they can never be trusted on the topic of guns.