ABC News fake footage knob creek
Image via YouTube courtesy ABC News.

Can you spell “fake news?” We can and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir earns today’s fake news award with extra cow-pie clusters for chutzpah. Last night, they broadcast footage from the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and claimed it as Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in Syria.

Image via YouTube courtesy ABC News.

Here’s the glorious video clip, posted by big media ABC News on YouTube. (We have a backup copy in case they take it down in shame.)

Pay particularly close attention at the 11 second mark.

David Muir’s substitute breathlessly reports on how the situation is “rapidly spiraling out of control in Syria.”

Then they queue up the Knob Creek footage and he continues . . .

This video right here appearing to show the Turkish military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the US against ISIS now horrific reports of atrocities, committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies…

The good news: no men, women, children or pets were injured or killed in that ABC News fake news clip.  Because, of course, the Knob Creek Range has great people running it safely for everyone involved.  Hundreds of thousands of rounds (if not millions) are fired each year and nobody gets hurt. Unless they trip and fall walking around behind the firing line, or get a blister from stuffing magazines.

Attending the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot stands as one thing every serious gun lover should do in their lifetime. And seeing that night shoot? Yeah, you don’t forget that. Take a look . . .

 

And arguably the best for last . . .

As you can see from the following side-by-side comparison of the footage below, the ABC News “World News Tonight” clip was clearly from Knob Creek.

It isn’t known whether they were duped or if they intentionally misrepresented the dramatic footage to spice up their report. Either way, it’s fake news of the highest order.

And that leads to the question…what else on yesterday’s “World News Tonight” was misleading, wrong, or just plain fake?

 

UPDATE: ABC has taken the video down. And they regret the error, so it’s all good.

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124 COMMENTS

    • Hopefully he will Tweet about this! Maybe TTAG can forward this to his White House press corespondent.

      • The Kurds involved have been conducting raids across the Turkish border against Turk military and civilians, against our advise. They refuse to stop. Turkey has been doing the same, against our advise, and refuse to stop.
        Turkey made it known they were going to scale up to major offensives Trump tried talking them down. No success. Trump chose to step aside, not to abandon. no more arms to the kurds and sanctions for the turks. We will observe areas and persons of ISIS interest and contain or re contain if need arises.

        this is of turk and kurn doings and interests, not ours. we do not need to get in another war with or for either side of this and in reality they both the bad guys.

        Nous Defions

        • In Turkey the only ethnic Identity allowed is Turkish. If you identify with another ethnic group you will be found dead in a ditch with your hands tied behind your back, marks on your body indicating torture, and a bullet in your head.

          The Kurds, through the PKK in eastern Turkey have been resisting the militant Turkish nationalism. How militant is the nationalism? In eastern Turkey on the mountain above a small city is a sign covering most of the side of the mountain proclaiming “Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk”. The sign is said to be bigger than the city below it.

      • You’re just another mindless a-hole that believes whatever he’s fed. Try not being led around by the nose for once, you might actually wake up.

    • That video might be the least misleading aspect of the recent “Trump abandoned our allies” narrative. Not claiming expertise, but it was worth doing some reading this weekend for me. Here’s how it looks to me:

      1) The Kurds have some ethnic cohesion (genetically more similar to each other than to Turks, Arabs, or Persians), so they are “a people” with ties based on that, though they are currently spread across multiple countries.

      2) But, there are different areas with very different views. My quick reading revealed seven clear groups of Kurds. One is more Western leaning, one is more “leave us alone,” one is kind of agrarian commie (Maoist). Key point: Two others are essentially terrorist organizations by any reasonable definition, especially the PKK.

      3) The PKK are far-left militants. They’ve been crossing over into Turkey to blow stuff up. They are not our friends, not our allies. These are bad dudes.

      4) Though I’m not a fan of Erdogan and the Islamist regime he’s been building, they seem to recognize the distinction and are after the bad guys. What they are doing now is trying to create a 20 mile buffer at their border to keep the terrorists out. They also blew the hell out of a major road further in to disrupt enemy movement, and perhaps to send a message.

      I’m thinking Trump did exactly the right thing. He basically didn’t want to get between the Turks and the terrorists. Why should we? He also cautioned that if the Turks do more than secure their borders from the terrorists, and start attacking “good” Kurds, the USA won’t put up with that. And it seems like our Kurd allies are fine with that.

      Another point: It’s probably more accurate to say that we were helping the Kurds with ISIS rather than that they were helping us.

      Still another point: We didn’t have that many people in the area to pull out anyway.

      All in all, the “we abandoned our allies” stuff seems like nonsense to me (pending further information, of course).

      • It’s yet more complicated than you suggest.

        The issues with the Kurds go back a few hundred years. I’ll leave that to people who wanna read a few books on the history of the area. I’ll also skip over the first 90% of the 20th Century.

        Fast forward through history to our *serious* involvement and we kinda step in it with the first Gulf War. In setting up the Northern No-Fly Zone we disarmed the Kurds in the area and moved them into camps along the Turkish border for their safety. Our intent was to sort them out after things were figured out with Saddam but that never happened.

        During that time they were disarmed and we *protected* them, but honestly we did so rather poorly. The Turks sent units over the border to “inspect” the camps (not Turkish territory). Their inspections consisted of trying to steal all the food, water and medicine we provided so that the Kurds would die as well as some jovial sporting games like rape.

        This led to US Special Forces nearly getting in shootouts with our Turkish “allies” on a semi-regular basis.

        Of all people, Robert Fisk was actually there and witnessed this kind of thing, including a near gunfight, first hand. He was prevented from reporting on it at the time because his newspaper editors censored him at the request of the Clinton Administration.

        This overall situation caused a fair number of ethnic Kurds to flee the camps and move back South, further into what a lot of people consider Northern Iraq proper (think Erbil and a bit North of that). There we kept them disarmed but allowed them to be brutalized by Saddam’s Bath Party agents, even basically ignoring to mass murder in police station basements.

        Messy.

        ==========

        But that’s not the only set of considerations here. Who else in involved here? Well, Moscow is heavily involved and that raises some questions based on geography. It’s Russia that mediated a, uh, well something, yesterday.

        I would note that Russia’s primary interest in Syria has never seemed to be screwing with the United States other than tangentially. At most putting their finger in our eye would seem to be a side benefit. Their primary goal seems to have been to protect their naval base at Tartus from falling to the rebels thanks to incompetence out of Damascus. From a Russian naval strategy perspective this makes sense.

        Other goals aside Russia has also gotten a hold of another deep, warm water port in Sevastopol which greatly increases the capabilities of their Black Sea Fleet. A Fleet that also happens to be bottled up by the Bosporus and the Dardanelles which are controlled by Turkey a current NATO ally.

        If memory serves, Russia has put some significant resources into it’s Black Sea Fleet in recent years, adding at least four subs and as many surface ships with at least six more of each planned for next year and more planned for the future along with modernizing the older vessels in that fleet. The Russian Defense Minister has specifically stated that this to “counter NATO”.

        It strikes me that a significant warming of the relations between Moscow and Ankara while relations between Ankara and D.C. cool would be of significant strategic importance to Russian naval interests looking to transit from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean at this point.

        =========
        Then there’s the overarching issue of whether or not the United States is perceived as “in it to win it” in various conflicts. Our treatment of some of our Afghan friends under Obama might suggest to the world that we are not. Our decades long dithering over the Kurds may reinforce this. It’s certainly a perception of us that China seems keen to advertise at the same time they’re encroaching on the Southern part of the South China Sea and inching their way towards de facto control over the Strait of Malacca and therefore effectively control over 25% of international shipping.

        Is it to our benefit to have the other countries in that region perceive us as… unreliable in the face of long term issues? That’s a serious question.

        The whole thing’s a fucking mess, a dumpster fire with the flames being fanned by the media.

        • Tom Kratman actually worked with the Kurds in the 90s. He has a lot to say about them, none of it good. There are reasons all their neighbors despise them, and there are reasons they couldn’t even get their act together to be even speed bumps for the tattered, shell-shocked survivors of Saddam’s Kuwaiti Adventure in ’91, in the most rugged, defensible terrain in northern Iraq. And these reasons are not coincidental.

          I am inclined to believe him, if only for his Internet rep of saying what he means and meaning what he says.

    • But, but . . . What I don’t understand is how the heck did they get Knob Creek all the way over to Syria that quickly???

      • Senator Rand Paul made that happen. He doesn’t think that the US should get entangled in the Middle East. Furthermore, he isn’t requesting assistance from the US military. He expects the Kentucky state militia – aided by local posses – are equal to the task.

    • I thought that looked familiar…incidentally, it’s not true “nobody gets hurt”…I was there the night somebody did…and it brought things to a halt in a hurry….

  2. Yawn, just another day in the fake news room. I’m sure that they just didn’t want to put any “reporters” in harms way. Yeah that’s it.

    • “…YAWN…” The difference between conservative comments and leftist. YAWN…The leftist would be out for blood, and they would get some. YAWN… This is a reason why the leftist are slowly winning. YAWN…they advance ground on every conservative mistake, punishing individuals and institutions Conservatives say…YAWN…and watch the leftist do it again and again.

      When will the conservatives will have no more “yawns” to give?

        • Cundy,

          Good points were raised by Just Saying, and you mock him without addressing a single one?

          Of course that is what a leftist CUND(T) would do.

      • Agreed GFY, no matter how evil the left is they fight to win. The right wingers mostly whimper.

      • …….and exactly what will change if I get all worked up over this? Propaganda will still flow from the MSM talking heads as if the opposition doesn’t exist. Even when they get caught they just change the subject for a few days and the sheep forget there was ever a problem. If I get all worked up over shit like this I wouldn’t get a moments rest because this crap never ends. Plus, I run ran out of fucks to give a couple of days ago and I’m waiting for a new supply to come in. Maybe I should buy one those outrage machines from some liberal and re-program it for conservative outrage instead.

    • It would tend to make one believe that they knew what they were reporting was fake. It allows them to disavow the false reporting by adding the ‘it appears’ to the report. As commented on above, how much of the rest of the stories ‘appeared’ to be true?

  4. “ABC News Busted for Using Knob Creek Footage in Report on Turkey’s Military Attacking Kurd Civilians”

    Just goes to show how far the msm will go to lie, smear and try to discredit POTUS Trump…

  5. I first saw that footage on a channel from Yemen before the US fake news got ahold of it. Was obvious it was a machine gun shoot and not Turkish Jihadis

    • Interesting, so likely Russian/Syrian/Iranian/Kurdish propaganda supplied to a local news source, then lapped up unquestioningly by the AP/BBC for Western audiences?

      • It was the “hook” they were looking for (other news agencies were broadcasting it). No need to verify when it fits the narrative.

    • The retraction is on page 36.

      Oh wait, this is the “modern” media (ABC, lol).

      The retraction is available online behind a paywall.

    • “Waiting for the retraction…waiting…still waiting…”

      The wait is *over*…

      “CORRECTION: We’ve taken down video that aired on “World News Tonight” Sunday and “Good Morning America” this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. ABC News regrets the error.”

      https://twitter.com/ABCWorldNews/status/1183772997771026432

      • The left crazies strike again!!! My reaction has become little more than “Oh, spare me.” I’m so tired of the constant faking and fabricating that I don’t think President Trump could possibly do ANYTHING that would keep me from voting for him. That man has more courage and stamina than can be imagined.

  7. Hey, could have been worse! Could have been ” Deranged US deplorables attack Kurdish village with assault weapons and high capacity ammo clipazines.”

  8. This would be great meme material. Keep the audio and anchor footage, “here we have exclusive footage of Turkey bombing the Kurds!” then cut to starwars footage, Avengers Endgame, Lord of the rings, Braveheart, inglorious bastards, etc…

  9. The sad thing is a lot of totally ignorant people still watch these news broadcasts and believe all that chit they spew out.

    • Yep that’s why they keep doing it. It works. It’s the same reason why democrats are so bold in their corruption. As long as they have the accepted beliefs, they know the media will cover for them.

  10. How’d they expect to get away w this? I’ll be watching for black and white Stuka footage tonight.

  11. Remember when the generals told Trump “We don’t have enough ammunition”? Obviously not looking in the right places!

  12. The foreground, background and distant lights do not match. If you want to convince me there is something fake here you have to do much better than these claims. Not saying it isn’t possible, but so far the claims does not match the video when I put them up side by side on mt two monitors.

    Trump has abandoned our Kurd allies. Putin has turned it to his advantage, as in desperation the Kurds have taken a Putin backed initiative to align with Assad, a mass murderer and enemy of the USA.

    As for the Kurds being allies to us: They fought in British army units during WW2, long before they had even the hint of their own country. They fought on the side of the USA in 1971, 1974 and in both Gulf Wars. They have been very successful in fighting ISIS, supported by American air power and special forces on the ground.

    Trump stabbed our allies in the back, now he is trying to dodge responsibility for his incompetence and love of tyrants, authoritarians and dictators.

    • So we go in for one mission, but we have to stay for a completely different mission, as in we must stay to defend the Kurds against our NATO allies? Hello mission creep. The military industrial complex thanks you for your service.

    • had he just sent troops there for the first time now, you’d be wailing about that.
      bring ’em home.

    • The Kurds are NOT “allies of the US or the civilized West. Or even friends of. One more Mohammadan tribe. Occasionally some have there rifles pointing the same general direction as ours. They are increasingly radical islamists (among many) who pretty much hate everyone, in particular ALL their neighbors and will use anyone for a moment of convenience.

      Calling the Kurds “allies” is as stupid as call some guy you met/got drunk with last Sat night “friend” today. Raise the bar/standard. That Barry the Moron abandoned Iraq, and later jumped into Syria, does not commit the US to spending the next century in the area. HIS commitments/promise where meaningless BS at the time and no one with a brain believed at the time. 4yr later are still BS.

      Many confuse the Kurds with Armenians. Same roots but the Armenians were Christian (the Turks massacred the Armenians a century ago, and never paid a price for it).

      • So despite acknowledging the Armenian genocide you are willing to let the Turks commit another war crime/atrocity against the Kurds because they’re Muslim, or mostly Muslim? You can’t even bring yourself to use the word Muslim, choosing to use archaic and derogatory Mohammedan. The US has a chance to do right with a local ally group; If abandoned I’d wager we see the seeds of the next enemy in the region develop. At best they’d just fall back to rely on Syria, Russia, or Iran….wait, it seems they’re already doing that. Mission creep caution but we can’t abandon those that helped us accomplish our goals, but trump wants to be snuggle buddies with dictators so this is what we get.

        • “…we can’t abandon those that helped us accomplish our goals”
          So how long are we beholden to the Kurds? And why, exactly are we beholden to them in the first place? You’re buying into the current media narrative that these were just super nice guys that sacrificed themselves to help the good ol’ USA! The reality is that they were fighting for their own land and WE helped them. Our only stated mission was to defeat ISIS, although Obama kinda sorta said he wanted Bashar al-Assad gone as well.

          We had an alliance because our current goals were aligned. That doesn’t mean that we stay there indefinitely to keep the peace. If Turkey, Iran, and Russia want to fight over who gets to police northern Syria, then let them have at it. America’s interest isn’t being served by being there.

        • I don’t disagree that when it’s times to go it’s time to go, we can’t stay there indefinitely. That said, why are we still supporting the DMZ in Korea? Why do we still have forces stationed at bases in that region? The issue is that the Kurds were allies/are allies. Now that they helped us reach our goal we leave, knowing they are unable to defend themselves against other “allies” that are bent on their destruction. We got what we wanted to to hell with those that helped us.

        • “We got what we wanted”

          And they got what they wanted. Sticking around forever as the global police force was never part of the deal unless you know something that the rest of us don’t. The Korea situation is completely different. For one thing, it was started long ago. We need to get out of there as well. Thankfully, the Trump admin has been working on that.

        • No one forced the Kurds to help us or receive help from us in the first place. It benefited them, which is why they did it.

        • That’s some ass-backwards logic “nobody forced them to help us.” The US likes to play the world’s police force. If we’re going to be a superpower and intervene, when asked/not asked, we need to be able to man up and ensure people that supported us get taken care of nicely. A little goodwill and assurance of safety goes a long way. I am all for pulling the US out of lengthy, unwanted, and unnecessary conflicts yet we can’t forget those that helped us along the way as they could be embittered enemies or side with enemies in the future.

          Think of all the US intervention in the ME along with all the coups we helped in South America. What a mess Vietnam was. We still have a presence in the Asian Pacific. We like to pull the strings and don’t really care about the consequences as long as it serves our interest. The Taliban is one reminder of former “allies” (used loosely) turning on us. We don’t do ourselves any favor by allowing Turkey to rip a new a-hole on the Kurds; the current Turkish government isn’t to be trusted anyway so this would be a good time to put them in their place. We did a shite thing and we’ll have to deal with it, no matter how much you pretend otherwise.

        • Middle East interventions – disaster
          South of the border interventions – disaster
          Vietnam interventions – disaster

          I see a very consistent trend. We need to get the hell out of the international intervention business. It’s done nothing but weaken and bankrupt us. America first. My opinion of course. We’ll have to agree to disagree.

        • We are not allied with the PKK terrorists. If the Turks keep pushing after they secure the 20 mile buffer zone they want to help keep PKK terrorists from crossing over to kill Turkish civilians, then let’s talk again.

        • And in the Revolutionary war the soon to be USA was/would’ve been a terrorist group. Interesting that British responses to Francis Marion are completely different than what most typical readers of this site would interpret. A terrorist to one nation is likely a hero to another. Considering Turkey’s history I don’t care if they consider the PKK a terrorist group. There are also several notable countries/groups that disagree with the terrorist designation of the PKK. I’d wager that most groups or individuals designated as terrorist (broad stroke here, I know) seem to have be disenfranchised or abused by another group. If the US really wants to make the Kurds identify more with the PKK and similar groups the sure thing would be to leave them hanging. it says just as much about the ones calling a group “terrorists” as it does about the group being labeled.

        • Turkey, and the big US base at Incirlik, are worth ten thousand times as much to the US as all the Kurds put together.

          Turkey is a NATO member, with a mutual defense treaty with the US. The Kurds don’t even have a country.

          Turkey is a NATO member because of the stellar performance of Turkish troops at the battle of Wawon in Korea in 1950. After Wawon the Chinese were terrified of the Turks and never again made a daylight frontal attack against a position they knew to be held by Turks. The only other troops they feared that much were American Marines. How many divisions did the Kurds contribute in Korea, again?

          The Kurds have a grossly inflated military reputation. All their neighbors despise them, for good historical reason. In 1991 Saddam Hussein beat them like he owned them–with the ragged remnants of the army he sent into Kuwait weeks before, where Western troops mopped the floor with them in a matter of hours. The Kurds are militarily worthless. The Turks are not, though it is a shame about the Erdogan regime’s great affection for and obvious desire to emulate the Ayatollahs in Iran.

          But don’t take my word for it.

          https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/most-folks-who-have-never-been-to-iraq-think-of-the-kurds-as-some-noble-non-islamic-ally-well-theyre-a-bit-better-than-the-typical-islamic-but-not-a-hell-of-a-lot/

      • “The Kurds are NOT “allies of the US or the civilized West”

        Some are (Western thinking, that is). Some are radical Marxists. Some just want to be left alone (think the Kurd versions of Gadsden Flag types). It would be kind of like saying Pakistanis and Indians are the same. The PKK (radical Marxist terrorists who have been killing innocent Turkish civilians) are not our allies, not our friends, and don’t deserve our protection. Other Kurd groups might.

        • Do we trust the Turkish government to really distinguish that? I sure don’t. Just like the Israeli government generally despises and minimizes all Palestinians, even the “good ones”. The Turks need to be watched closely on this and held accountable.

    • Enuf, I get your point, and to an extent, agree with it. This an absolute shitty thing to happen to to Kurds. But the liberal outrage on this is quite ironic considering pulling out of the Middle East entirely used to be a foremost (but failed) goal under Obama…

      But more importantly then partisan politics is the fact that is not only inevitable, but eternal. Do you really want America to maintain a presence in the Middle East forever? Should we colonize the region? There will never be peace there, the problems will never be solved. And it’s frankly not our place to try. These wars stretch back into ancient times. We don’t need their oil anymore due to shale and fracking and we don’t need to drain on lives and money. I feel bad for the Kurds, but this isn’t our war. Being the global policemen is becoming a far greater liability then it is a benefit.

      • The Obama admin tried so hard to pull out of the Middle East and bring stability to the region that they decided to topple the Libyan government and, at one time or another, help ALL FOUR sides of the conflict in Syria, thus helping to continue the suffering instead of ending it. Oh yeah and they (Obama admin) helped to create a massive humanitarian crisis and further instability, causing a massive migrant problem for Europe, and somehow, the U.S.

        Remember when the media was losing their minds over these failures? Me either.

        • “The Obama admin…decided to topple the Libyan government”

          Don’t forget about helping to hand Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood. What a clown show. But that doesn’t hold a candle to the disaster of Libya.

      • “This an absolute shitty thing to happen to to Kurds”

        You say that like the Kurds are a single entity. I don’t like the current Turkish regime very much, but the PKK (radical leftist terrorists) who have been crossing into Turkey to blow up civilians deserve neither sympathy nor protection from us. Yes, the genoside. Yes, modern Turkey includes land that many Kurds regard as theirs. But standing in between the Turks and the terrorists would be stupid, and I don’t think the Kurds we have been working with want us to either. Now, if the Turks keep pushing after they have established their 20 mile buffer zone to keep out the terrorists, then we can start talking about responsibilities to allies.

        • Honestly, even if they keep pushing south to try and take all of Syria, I still personally don’t think we should get involved. It’s not within our ability to control the destiny of an entire continent with cultures older then our country by a factor of 20. The Middle East will always undergo cycles of war and conquest and if it’s not directly threatening us then we don’t need to be involved.

    • “If you want to convince me there is something fake here you have to do much better than these claims.”

      Well, ABC has “apologized.” Is that enuf?

    • I shoot down there twice a year, definitely knob creek. Those are barrels exploding with glow sticks attached, not to mention the mini gun with a straight belt of tracer. No surprise the news is caught again lying.

    • I’ve spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of rounds at KCR. The ABC footage sure looks like their annual machine gun shoot. I can’t be absolutely certain that it isn’t some other huge nighttime machine gun shoot at a 300 yard range, but unless the Kurds have taken to building barricades out of Tannerite, I can promise you that’s not a war zone.

  13. We’ve seen so much fake news, propaganda, edited pictures to support a bias, etc, from the media. One of my favorite examples is the Weather Channel reporter being blown by hurricane force winds, while 2 pedestrians are casually walking across the back of the scene.

    Why aren’t they overwhelmingly being called to task?

    • “Why aren’t they overwhelmingly being called to task?”

      Because the people whose job it is to do that is, well it’s them. Others try, but they don’t have the same megaphone.

  14. ABC Knew damn well it was “Fake News”! That’s why the lead in commentary to the that vid segment states “This video obtained by ABC News “APPEARS TO SHOW” the attack on …..” 100% Their sourcing, didnt think they would be caught but still deliberately placed a line of text for deniability.

    Their fake news effort would almost be laffable if it wasn’t such a common daily act of deliberate deciet perpetrated against the America Public.

  16. You expect truth and facts from the CommiecRat propaganda wing,Goebbels would be proud of them.

  18. You gotta be pulling my lariat here. Seriously?! That’s hilarious.

    I bet they show Knob Creek and Big Sandy footage at DNC conventions just to get the panties all wadded up for gun control.

  19. Actually the news media has become pretty anti-Israel lately since they’re in lockstep with the modern democratic party. They’re just looking for any excuse to bust Trump’s balls.

  20. Well, he did use the weasel word “appearing”. Schmuck.

    I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Lame Stream Media would misrepresent reality. I’m reminded of a clip “showing” an Israeli missile hole in a Palestinian ambulance. The hole was perfectly round with 4 mounting screw holes. Missile, eh?

  21. To the gun grabbers it doesn’t make a bit of difference where the footage came from. All they’ll see is the massive firepower, and that will lend more credence (in their minds) to their claim that AR’s, etc. are weapons of war and have to be banned. Even the retraction that explains this was a controlled range shoot that has been happening twice a year for years will be used by the left for their agenda.

    Understand that the vast majority of the left have no idea such events exist (in many States, not just KY) or that so many people attend them with their own full auto firearms, or God forbid, RENT or BORROW them without a full background check!! To them, this is totally unacceptable. In addition, they will get support from the Environmentalists.

    Bottom line is that it scares the crap out of them, just to realize the general population has this kind of firepower on-hand and knows how to use it – against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

    • And now the anti gunners can show real footage of Knob Creek, compare it to fake footage of the invasion of Syria and say, “see, we are right, there is exactly no difference in what you see in gun owners ranges and what you see in actual war zones; indeed these are the same weapons of war.”

  23. Whatever happened to the ENDLESS WARS talking point that the left has been feeding America since we invaded Iraq? It’s hilarious that the liberals in Congress are demanding continued military intervention in the Middle East. The media continues to suck.

  24. Annnnnnd I rarely do more than glance at the “network” snooze. Except for FOX(and CBN) they are all in the tank for Dumbocrats. Even CBN has gone crazy with Pat Robertson claiming Trump will lose the “mandate of heaven” for leaving the Kurds. I’m thinking this ABC bs is just lazy…

  25. So what does ABC news want us to do? Have 1000 U.S. Soldiers (mostly light) engage with the Turkish military? Airstrikes against Turkey? (I can see it now, aircraft take off from Incirlik, bomb Turkish troops, and then fly back and land in Incirlik.) Send in 100,000 more Soldiers to create a buffer in Turkey then fight against Turkey to protect the Kurds? (Who gets the Article 5 when two NATO allies decide to exchange lead?)

    This is some grade A turn brain off crap from the news media. What kind of shit show do they want us to enter into? It’s a mess over there and the less we get in between Turkey, Syria, the Kurds and Russia, the better.

    • There was a big shift away from Incirlik AB a little over a year ago (maybe two years + by now) with forces redirected to Al Udeid AB in Qatar, Sheikh Isa AB in Bahrain, Ali Al Saleem in Kuwait, and Al Dhafra in UAE because of the shenanigan that Turkey was pulling in regards to overflight operations ISO the fight against D’aesh. The Turks were also caught buying oil from the so-called Caliphate—not to mention having a porous border into Syria and doing nothing to stem the flow of foreign jihadis flocking to join ‘the struggle.’ That was all before the failed coup d’etat. Turkey hasn’t been much of an ally—whether it was the purchase of the Russian S-400 or surrounding U.S. forces in N. Syria…they’ve acted more aggressively and this latest escapade is not going to end well.
      Just my humble $0.02 opinion.

  27. On the up side, this was great publicity for Knob Creek. Probably get an overflow crowd next Spring. 🙂

  29. Who knew I now live in Syria, I’ll have to tell my Mom when I go out to her house this afternoon, she lives ten minutes from Knob Creek. Hey Mom did you know that we have dual citizenship according to ABC “news”??

    • The signs were in front of you all this time – in the grocery store, right there in the dairy section. Small or Large Kurd cottage cheese and cheese Kurds. Make sure you support your local Kurds. Avoid the Kurds with no added salt, they aren’t as tasty.

  30. Give em all short range tactical nukes that will auto-magically disarm themselves if used outside the region. Let em sort it all out on their own.

  32. Readers are invited to comment. I did, earlier today, my signed comment does not appear. Is it lost in the coils of The Internet, or elsewhere? If necessary, I can rewrite. Please advise. thanks.

  33. This is merely a reminder that “media” is a business. It’s not altruistic, it’s parasitic.

    While I am a fervent advocate for the First and Second Amendments, I try to be cognizant of their limitations. Gun manufacturers NEED to sell us guns. Media outlets NEED to capture our attention, in order to sell their fare to advertisers.

    I can imagine it now, some knucklehead thought to himself/herself “Wow, this is awesome! I bet nobody’s going to notice, it’s just a second or two”…

    • Except if you’ve been following the news media for the past three years, you’ll notice that the “mistakes” are always in one particular direction. If you have even a basic understanding of statistics, or you know, common sense, you would know this would be impossible to all be mistakes. They shout their fake news “mistakes” from the rooftops and get everyone riled up, then they quietly issue a retraction at 4 am. Then they move on to the next fake crisis before anyone notices.

  35. Once again our idiot President stabs one of our Allies right in the back. He is good at that.

    Using archival footage (even in the wrong country) to dramatize the war is not exactly fake news at all. Not being able to see the big picture on the consequences of the war and Trumps treachery is what we should be focusing on. I find the whole uproar silly and a deliberate distraction from what is presently going on there. I do not watch state run news, Fox News but I imagine they were delighted to use this as a distraction to deflect what Trump has done.

    • Somebody should get fired over this one.

      I don’t bother watching TV news at all anymore, have not for a number of years now. I do bring up a half dozen or so of their websites each morning and page thru news stories that way.

      Most of the big news sources do well on general news stories. It is when the story is hitting on a major emotional/political hot button topic that things get dicey. At which point the problem is normally spin and bias and pandering to the political leanings of this or that group.

      It is unusual in the USA for outright “Fake News” to appear. When it does, it is normally a video of Trump speaking, telling lies, screwing shit up.

      The tragic part of this thing is indeed the distraction from reality.

      The Kurds got stabbed in the back by the USA, via Donald Trump. That is very real and damned black stain on our country’s honor.

        • Iraq was GW Bush’s fault, along with his minions who imagined they could re-write history and the map of the Middle East.

          Obama screwed up in Syria and Libya. His red line with Assad, then pretending his response was adequate. His going after Qaddafi, which was well warranted but then he had no plan for what would come next. Two major screw-ups, so recently after Bush made similar major errors.

          Doesn’t help Trump any. The wrongs or rights of another do not erase or improve the deeds of the next guy in the office. Two wrongs do not make a right.

        • Correct. I’m stating that this behavior of ours Actually isn’t out of the norm. We abandoned a slew of different peoples at the end of Nam who went on to be brutalized by the communists. We abandoned Afghanistan after the soviets left thinking everything would be fine. We abandoned the Kurds after the gulf war. We abandoned Iraq, and now Syria. We aren’t setting some new shocking precedent and we aren’t showing anyone anything they don’t already think. People all up in arms about what it means to our allies need to understand we do this all the time. The fact that anyone continues to rely on us after all that is an amazement. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  36. It’s TELEVISION. They need PICTURES. If they don’t have ACTUAL pictures, they will use STOCK FOOTAGE substitutes. They’ve been doing it forever. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the wrong airplane, the wrong submarine, or the wrong building on television. And stock footage substitution was going on in the movies long before the advent of television. I can recall seeing films in which they changed airplane types IN MID FLIGHT and where they showed dramatic scenes purported to be taking place in a given locale but having geographic features totally alien to that locale. They just can’t help themselves, and they hope you won’t notice. However, I totally agree; in news reporting this practice is ABSOLUTELY UNFORGIVABLE.

    • AMC’s “Hell on Wheels” western series did a great job of substituting locations in Alberta, Canada, for all sorts of places along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad. But when it came to their Utah episodes, I just had to laugh. There’s nowhere in Alberta that doubles well for Utah’s high-altitude desert.

      But that’s a whole different thing. Movies are fiction, and if they manage to incorporate objective reality or even mimic it well, that’s merely a bonus.

      As you say, in a business that purports to not only tell, but SHOW the truth, this kind of deception is unforgivable. And yet the news networks pull this kind of crap *all the time.* The bigger the player, the bigger the deception. Most of the news we see is fake at some level; the tough part is discerning when and why they’re doing it.

  37. I guess it is a lot cheaper and way less dangerous than to actually send an actual journalist and a photographer to Syria to document what is actually going on. What the heck, they did not even need to recycle the Knob Creek Footage, could have made it all up in CGI.
    What was that? Oh, sorry I didn’t check out what good CGI costs these days. It really is cheaper to send a journalist and a photographer to Syria. Guess they needed the Knob Creek Footage after all.
    Brian Williams created the precedent after all.

  38. Notice that the NBC broadcast said it was footage “APPEARING TO SHOW” Turkish forces bombing the Kurds.

    Them’s weasel words…they knew that footage was BS from start to finish. They just didn’t care until they were called on it.

    National news has been doing crap like this for a long time.

    Remember the “swine flu” scare back in about 2010? They were doing breathless “live on location” reports from a university campus that I know like the back of my hand…and every report featured the same stock footage of people in medical masks walking past the same building that clearly wasn’t on the campus they said they were on.

    If they’ll blatantly lie about something like that, where the stakes are merely getting a few more eyeballs in a slow news cycle, imagine how bad it’s going to be in a time like this one, when in addition to profit, they’ve all convinced themselves they’re fighting Literally Hitler.

    If the broadcast studios and corporate HQs of all the major networks were vaporized one day when all the talking heads and the bigwigs were at work, I’d be sad about the loss of life, especially for the normal people who work lower on the totem pole…but we’d all be so much better off.

  39. My buddy lives by Knob Creek and that might show is on my bucket list! Then again, if the DIMS keep acting up about the 2nd Amendment they might see it for real!

  41. Runaway slave here. I ran from california to the Land of Knob Creek and NAF ownership. I’m a free man with my own MG.
    (smile)

    I look forward to reading TTAG comments on how no one needs an MG to “waste” ammo on. If I got a box of ammo for each negative comment on MG ownership I’d have plenty of ammo each time I went to the range.

    The press is very negative on MG ownership. And sadly so are many on TTAG.

    • @Chris T in KY
      What kind of machinegun? A submachinegun or one of those things (e.g. Browning M2) that sits on a tripod and is fed from a belt?

  42. Long ago, at the end of WW1, the Allies (France and Britain) were chopping up the Ottoman Empire (since the Ottomans has foolishly gotten on the loosing side). The areas controlled by the Ottomans had never been nations, but were tribal regions. When Churchill was helping draw up the lines of the newly “liberated” countries, he made sure to put soon to be disgruntled minoritys in EVERY country. The Kurds had a region they lived in and raided out of, so the European’s cut up their homeland into three different countries, with a little bit in each, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. They also made sure there were Sunnis in majority Shia areas, and Shia in majority Sunni areas. The idea was to make sure there would NEVER be piece in the region……And then they discovered oil. Ops.

    • they do this kind of stuff all the time…probably because they hire a bunch of young shits who don’t know any better….my all-time favorite was a scene of jet combat over Korea with a soundtrack of propeller aircraft!……

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