I’m awed and inspired by the bravery of this young boy. I hope he makes it through this war. A clever kid like that is destined to do great things in life.
I hate to say it, but that looks very staged to me.
The very first shot at the 3 second mark appears to be coming OUT of a hole in the wall.
When the kid appears to get shot in the chest or shoulder he is enveloped in a cloud of dust as if he’s been hit by a chalk-board duster. He doesn’t appear to flinch at the initial impact, but stops afterward and falls to the ground before getting back up with no signs of major injury.
And yet:
I wonder who their experts were.
The violence against children in Syria is very real.
This video, not so much, I think.
Movie gun shot physics aren’t the same as real-world gun shot physics. Just sayin’…
I wondered if the sniper was deliberately pulling his shot. Targeting kids is a war crime.
Thats my only explanation why the kid survived.
Gunshot victims often say that they didn’t realize they’d been shot. It’s not the movies.
Yeah. I know it’s easy to just watch a Youtube vid and cry “FAKE!”
So really, I got nothin’.
But, it just looks very, very off to me.
The wind is blowing ‘west’. The kid gets up and faces east. Plume of dust ejects sharply from his chest going east and then a foot or so from his chest the wind takes the dust west again. Then he dramatically falls. Then gets up again.
This is silly staged theatrics.
Running pretty good and swinging either arm real well for someone who’d taken a chest hit. My guess is that the vid’s real, the sniper missed or the bullet ricocheted off the ground and into his shirt, and the kid played dead. If you’d told me that the bullet just zipped through his torso, without hitting bone, and the bullet track was too small for the bullet to tumble, I’d buy that too. Terminal ballistics can be wonky and 7.62x39 FMJ effects are traditionally inconsistent. See Mike Day’s ordeal for an example.
Ballsy kid.
Just too hard to tell with the bobbing video and all of the chants to Allah in the background.
I’d actually be genuinely interested to hear from any military or gun experts who could explain the cloud of dust that surrounds the boy’s shoulders. Is this something that could conceivably be produced by an actual bullet impact? Even an ricochet?
In my completely expert-of-nothing mind, it just seems like something that could only be created by some kind of non-bullet projectile.
How many kids have you seen shot by snipers? What are you comparing this to?
I think the kid lived because the sniper sucked. You don’t lead children as much.
The audio sounds really strange on the video clip. Not that I’m expecting THX or anything, but it sounds like the fighting’s going on outside a cave mouth, and the guy filming it is about 75 yds or so inside the cave—it doesn’t sound like the fighting and the room where they’re watching it are even in the same city, never mind the same street. But I’m certainly not knowledgeable about the subject.
The reason I bring this up is that you can usually hear a rifle bullet hit flesh if you’re not near the muzzle (and sometimes even if you are). It sounds like a dull, wet Plop or Thwop!, kinda like the scene in Rocky where Stallone’s punching the hell out of a side of beef. Now, I’ve only heard that in person for game animals (deer, etc…) not people, but the sound can be audible from a surprisingly far distance away. I was expecting a similar sound near the :36 second mark in the video where the kid gets ‘hit’ and I didn’t hear one. As to the dust coming off the kid, he’s lying in the street, the street looks covered in fine dust, and so I’d expect the kid’s shirt to be covered in dust too. Thwack a rug that’s dust laden, and see the cloud that comes off it. I’m guessing that it’s something similar in his case.
Or it could be a squib charge, who knows?
Calling these guys snipers seems kind of a stretch.
Why is he on the ground at the start, and why is he not shot at that point? And what good does playing dead do if it’s only for a second or two? I doubt the video fake, but it’s not making much sense to me at the moment.
You make it sound like Big Brother.
No, I was just saying that I hope somehow, he manages to survive and gets a chance to do something positive with his life. I realize the odds aren’t very good. He’ll probably get involved in the fighting in another two or three years.
Of course it is staged, the kid was just pretending that he was hit. My impression of the dust cloud was that he had thrown out dirt from his hands to form an impromptu screen from the sniper.
Well lets hope he doesn’t get voted out of the war.
Yeah, it’s a fake. I heard it this evening on the CBS Evening News but this is the first cite from Google that was handy.
Thanks Fiveroptic.
Even if the people behind the fake video made it as a well-intentioned social comentary, I think it was a pretty dumb thing to do. It just gives people an avenue for denying or ignoring a real problem.
And it is a very real and serious problem.
From the same article:
It’s sort of interesting that most people caught on that it was staged. The human mind can perceive very subtle differences and recognize when something is “off”.
I got pwned. :smack:
I guess it won’t be the last time. It’s hard to trust anything we see anymore.