Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
The original claim is false and comes from a pretty unusual content mill blog.
What prompted me to fact check was the text-in-image screenshot of something that made me feel outrage. That plus some details but no way to verify w/ the source (which gun store in lexington? Who originally posted this?) is usually a pretty good indicator that a claim needs further verification before sharing.
I checked to see if OP had any other information in the post, but the tags were crammed with variants of “acab” and lots of increasingly irrelevant subjects. The blog had lots of similar screenshots, and seemed to be a content mill that followed and liked only three quotes blogs. This is not evidence of misinfo, but fits the bill. So I looked at the image closer and noticed the brand name on the target. I looked up “triumph systems target phone” to find a link to the shop and found this within seconds.
While one certainly *could* shoot the target, the point is to *not* shoot this one, and to shoot a guy holding a gun on the other side instead. So the implication of the original post (that gun stores in lexington KY sell “bystander” targets for cops to shoot) is false.
It’s not clear what the original blog is doing. Are they a misinformed content mill owner? Are they a genuine blog that posted something wrong? Are they deliberately spreading false information like this to make “owning the libs” easier? Are they spreading viral posts to gain followers to spread other information? Are they part of a deliberate attempt to divide the american people and sow discontent that would benefit the owners of the operation?
That’s not to say that policing practices are actually okay because this claim is wrong, we can talk about how cops are trained primarily about weaponry and very little about conflict management and how, or how police departments historically have selected less-intelligent cops to maximize obedience, or how when they do enforcement without escalation that doesn’t necessarily mean what they’re enforcing is morally okay.
For more information on misinformation along this vein, there’s a good blog that tracks highly unusual content mills that follow a specific pattern of posting that also happen to spread large amounts of misinformation: @ms-disinformation
