(WARNING: The link contains gifs of the video of the Christchurch mosque shooting.)

How we know New Zealand mosque shooting video is a CGI fake

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(1) WHEN SHOT, PEOPLE DON’T JUST FALL LIKE INERT SACKS OF POTATOES
In an audio interview and on James Fetzer’s blog, Dr. Scott Bennett, former U.S. Army psychological operations officer and State Department counterterrorism contractor, points out that in a real shooting with real bullets, especially when civilians are shot, they would be in a state of hysterical, emotional shock. Panic-stricken, their bodies flooded with adrenalin, they would violently flail, run or crawl away. They do not simply fold up and fall to the ground like sacks of potatoes.

In the mosque shooter’s live-streamed video, however, the victims immediately fall to the floor, face down (faces are more of a CGI challenge). Once fallen to the floor, the victims stay still, with nary a moan nor twitch.

It stretches our credulity to think that the mosque shooter is such an expert marksman that every shot he fired was a kill shot. The fact is that in real life, bullets can bounce, ricochet, and miss the target.

Writing in “What really happens when you get shot,” Wired, Dec. 8, 2015, Connor Narciso, a former Army Green Beret who served in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, with 3rd Special Forces Group, explains:

As a combat medic in Afghanistan, I treated a variety of gunshot wounds. And as the husband of an emergency room provider at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, gun violence has remained—at least peripherally—a significant part of my life—.

[E]ven multiple gunshots to the torso won’t guarantee death, or even incapacitation. Arun Nair is an attending physician in the ER at Johns Hopkins, and an International Health Fellow. “Bullets are magic,” Nair tells his students. He recounts the story of a young man in Lebanon who survived after being shot six times.1 He took repeated shots to the chest and throat. One of the six bullets stopped inside his pericardium, the narrow space between the heart and its thin protective membrane. Another bullet ended up in the victim’s esophagus; he swallowed it. Amazingly, the patient was alert and speaking lucidly to the doctors. You can’t assume anything, says Nair.

(2) SHELL CASINGS DON’T VANISH INTO THIN AIR
At the 8:56 mark in the video, the gunman is outside the mosque’s front gate and begins shooting down the street, for no apparent reason. At the 9:06 mark, the gunman turns around and shoots down the street in the other direction.

Curiously, the video shows shell casings being ejected from the semi-automatic, but the casings then disappear into thin air. No shell casings are on the ground because this footage was actually taken not on the street but before a “green screen”, which explains why we see shell casings being ejected but no casing actually falls to the ground.

(3) BULLETS LEAVE NO MARKS WHEN THEY HIT THE VICTIMS
After shooting up and down the street, ejecting shell casings that vanish into thin air, the gunman returns to his car and exchanges rifles, tossing the one he had used to the ground next to his car, which later also vanishes. He then inexplicably returns to the “crime scene” to shoot again and again at the crumpled bodies in the mosque. Strangely, the “bullets” leave no marks on the victims’ clothes or bodies. Upon impact, we see only puffs of air on the victim’s clothes, which suggests the gun was a toy gun that blasts air instead of solid projectiles.

Yesterday, in an email to James Fetzer, Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today who is, like Fetzer, a U.S. Marines veteran, wrote:

“I generally recognize any part or accessory available worldwide for this type of weapon the common sellers, palmetto state armory, delta team tactical, classic firearms—and nobody has part for real guns that look like the things in the video. mike and i have built thousands of custom AR weapons in every size and caliber this stuff is crap—..and quite possibly toys—.What we have in NZ appears to be (real or fake) video of fake guns.”

Indeed, in a comment, Kevin J. Lankford, a reader of FOTM, observed that the shooter’s guns “looked like nothing I could identify,” and that the reason why the guns are painted with white symbols all over is precisely “to disguise the fact they are fake.”

(4) BULLETS FIRED AT WINDSHIELD LEAVE NO HOLES OR SHATTERED GLASS
After the gunman finally leaves the mosque, he gets back into his car. While driving away, he shoots at the car’s windshield three times. Strangely, the bullets leave no marks on the windshield — no bullet holes, no smashed glass — as you can see in the GIF below and the pic of his arrest by police.

To conclude, the shooter’s livestream video was made with a live man shooting guns, at least one of which is a toy air gun, before a “green screen”. The “green screen” is then filled in with CGI images of the mosque and victims being shot; of the street outside the mosque where the gunman fired shots, ejecting shell casings that vanished into thin air; and of his car, wherein the gunman shot at the car’s windshield, leaving no bullet holes or shattered glass.

All in all, the video was poorly and sloppily made. Wellington should have hired Sir Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop instead to do the job.