[correction police]they were unfired,[/correction police]
Don’t discount slingshots.
That’s another possibility.
I haven’t seen any NATO ammunition in a while but I remember it having a green anti-corrosion coating on it. Or I could be on crack.
Or maybe the green coating could be crack, did you think about that? I mean, that might explain why they were throwing their bullets at houses.
Ah, thanks.
That would make sense. Olive drab crack.
When I was running around with an M16 (never in war - lucked out with service that ended just before our first Bush foray into the Middle East), my shooting positions were regularly decorated with unspent rounds.
I didn’t drop them. The damned things were duds. I swear, one round in 100 would not fire, jam the pea-shooter, I would have to eject it and go through the reset process.
Cheap-ass ammo…
When it was time to qualify, many of use would smuggle in nice boxes of Federal Premium rounds, rather than trust our scores to the USMC’s lowest bidder.
SO - some poor GI Joe ejects a round that once against jammed his rifle. In frustration, he picks it up and throws it at her house!
Very plausible.
Confirm - mostly. My father was peripherally involved with this effort, at a low level. The bullets and charges were pulled, the charge replaced with ball powder (which burns at a substantially faster rate than the original powder, and thus generates HUGE chamber pressures), then the bullet reseated - resulting in serious damage to the firing weapon, if not outright destrution and serious injury to the firing soldier.
However, they weren’t scattered about, so much as they were salted into otherwise-sound munitions stashes that the troops had found. The idea was to lower morale, by lowering the ememy’s confidence in their arms and munitions. To this day, my father will not use surplus 7.62x39 amunition.
The bullet is the projectile only. A round or cartridge is the entire asssembly which goes in the firing chamber–the bullet plus the casing containing the gunpowder.
Believe me, I’ve got no dog in this particular fight, but I can suggest a possible scenario that fits: fired bullets did hit her house, but she likely would have had a hard time recovering them, as they could have been deeply embedded in whatever they hit. So looking around outside, she finds a couple of unfired rounds (perhaps duds,as Algher mentioned) and displays those instead. In such a case, the caption should have read “…two bullets of the type she says hit her house…” and everything would be fine. Sloppy editing I find more likely than out-and-out propagandising by AFP.
Feel free to consider the above plausible or not. I’m not gonna get too worked up about this one.
I doubt anyone checked those rounds for a firing pin dent.
This reminds me of a particularly sad bit of propaganda footage used in the first (1991) Gulf War.
The news (and I forget which news outlet was showing this, but it was mainstream television) showed a fruit stand with a plywood board for a roof…hardly more substantial than Lucy’s psychiatry booth in Peanuts. The board was sagging down about two feet, bent or damaged in the middle, although it had not broken in half, nor had the sticks holding it up been destroyed.
The reporter gravely informed us that this fruit stand had been “destroyed by a direct hit from an American Tomahawk cruise missile.”
Yeah, that’s the one with the 1,000 pound warhead of high-detontation-rate military-grade explosive, flying at 400+ miles per hour, in a projectile also filled with jet fuel.
Totally bent that plywood. That’ll be a bitch to fix…take upwards of 10 minutes, unless there’s two of you.
Sailboat
In general, I find the media to be grossly incompetent where it comes to reporting on matters military. True, a lot of military news is essoteric and requires a bit of education, background, and context to report accurately, but even such simple and obvious fucks-up, such as described by Sailboat are common. There are a few who either know by personal experience (Michael Yon), or by dint of research and dedication (the late Mr. Bloom) get it right, but even simple stuff is screwed up royally by even well-respected names, such as Amanpour and Blitzer - even now, after years of exposure.
I spent a good chunk of GW1 screaming at the tube over the various reporters’ fucks-up, before I became resigned to their stupidities. GW2, I was expecting it, and merely spent a lot of time shaking my head. I still don’t know why so many of them must remain incompetent; It takes very little to learn the basics.
Good point.
My problem is the picture itself. I’m picking up a lot of error level around the hand and ammo, plus the backdrop is changed. The pic is possibly a fake. At the very least, it’s quite doctored.