I often get very defensive over stock photos. Different publishing companies have different access to images that they pay for the rights to use, and it is what it is. Bearing Arms is no different. Sometimes I’m not in love with the images we’re beholden to use, but that’s life. Knowing that, I still had to let out a chuckle when I caught a glimpse of a screenshot of a tweet from Reuters the other day.

Ukraine says it has repelled Russian incursion in Sumy region https://t.co/dE81E0R9P6 pic.twitter.com/une4hkj0M6

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 16, 2022

The menacing looking men in the photograph, from a distance, and certainly from the small screen of a phone do look like they’re doing some military stuff. Now, I don’t know much about the Ukrainian military, so they very well may wear those types of masks in battle. Blowing up the picture or zooming in on it will give the big reveal. Paintball markers. Yup. Or paintball guns, depending on which camp you subscribe to. They have neat little hoppers on top of the “weapons” and I don’t think they’re filled with ball bearing balls.

I get it. This “gun stuff” is not in the purview of every journalist, reporter, or blogger. Truthfully, most of our mainstream media consists of anti-freedom, anti-civil rights, anti-gun people who are bigotted against the Second Amendment. We almost expect these kinds of blunders from the side of the aisle that hates liberty. Many of us actually revel in these blunders, such as those magazine-clip ones that we’ll hear. Just the other day I had read a report about the Buffalo shooting, which is all kinds of blunderous.

Casado, 19, said [killer’s name] had stopped by his mobile home on Friday, the day before the massacre, and dropped off five boxes of 5.66 mm high-caliber ammunition, a high-powered rifle and two additional boxes of evidence.

Now this high-caliber box of 5.66 mm (a 5.66 round, to my understanding, is some sort of obscure underwater round) ammo was described by the UK’s Daily Mail. We can’t expect the royal hoplophobes to get this, but the problem was the New York Post picked up the same verbiage from the Mail’s story.

Let’s all have a good little laugh over Reuters’ mistake in using a stock photo of people engaging in deadly paintball combat, passing it off as if it were battle scenes from Ukraine. There are many jollies to be had over the constant all thumbs approach conventional media takes to complicit and blissful ignorance to anything that goes bang bang. In reality though, it is a dangerous thing. There are countless fence sitters and gun agnostics that are fed the same garbage the hardcrore pinko commies are, and they’re being misinformed. What I struggle with, is this just ignorance, or willful ignorance, delivering an intended consequence? Now get out there to the range and shoot off some of those magazine-clips, through your fully semi-auto high-caliber 5.66 mm rifle with the shoulder thingy that goes up and down my friends.