Journalists, as a species, aren’t gun people. This was clear the moment USA Today decided to illustrate the possible accessories for the AR-15 and included the chainsaw bayonet, for crying out loud, if at no other point before. However, an Ohio television station decided to go even further in showing us just how little they know about guns.

In this clip, they decided to show us just how deadly the AR-15 is by showing a watermelon being shot. There’s just one problem. Can you find it?

If you said, “But that’s a shotgun,” you win!

That’s right, it’s a shotgun shooting that watermelon. You can tell because of the lack of a chainsaw bayonet or a “shoulder thing that goes up.”

Oh…and that’s it’s obviously a freaking shotgun.

I get that most people aren’t as into guns as I am or as most of our readers here are, but the shotgun is fairly common. Even Hollywood tends to get some aspects of the shotgun right, especially the pump-action needing to be…you know…pumped. That’s precisely what happens in this video. The weapon is pumped, then fired.

And the mainstream media wonders why the term “fake news” gets so much play. This. This is why.

There’s no way this is an honest mistake by an otherwise intelligent individual. I can’t even chalk this one up to laziness. I just don’t see how this is a case of simply not checking up on some facts and getting something wrong. This is either a case of weapons-grade stupid, or it’s a case of the media believing that you have a case of weapons-grade stupid and won’t notice the difference.

There’s nothing in this clip that tells us either way, but what we can tell is that it presents a false image of the AR-15, assuming viewers actually don’t pick up the difference.

However, here’s a real AR-15 shooting a watermelon.

Notice the difference?

It’s also important to note that shooting a watermelon isn’t like shooting an kind of animal, be it human or game critter. Flesh of any kind reacts very differently to being shot than fruit does.

Because of that difference, shooting a slab of meat, even with a shotgun, won’t seemingly vaporize the target. It won’t do much of anything as far as the camera can tell at first glance, truth be told, and that’s the problem.

Shooters like pumping rounds into watermelons because of their fragile nature. They react violently when shot, thus looking really cool and making everyone shooting feel really tingly all over.

They’re not representative of how effective one gun is over another, one round over another, or anything else. It just looks kind of awesome on video.

But most people don’t know that. They think this is a true representation of the awesome power of the firearm when it’s not.

Was that what the reporter was trying to convey? Honestly, with that much dumb in a clip only a few seconds long, it’s hard to tell. What I do know is that this clip is ample evidence as to why no one should take the news media at face value on anything, ever.

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