Debunked: Lack of Smoke shows Michael Slager shooting of Walter Scott was Staged

TEEJ

Senior Member.
Stumbled upon this one. Rather silly as they are claiming that lack of smoke means that it was staged! Obviously they have never heard of the different rounds and variations of powder.



[Update by @Mick West ] This is debunked on examination of the original video. While the smoke is not visible on low resolution YouTube copies, it's certainly there on the original
 

This video gets off to a slow start, lot of technical stuff about smokeless vs. black powder, but when he shows the difference in actual firing guns it's pretty clear that the video just doesn't have the quality or stability to draw this conclusion from. Comments also discuss how much easier cleaning and maintaining a gun is when you only use smokeless powder, so I would assume anyone who's job and life depends on the gun remaining reliable for a long time would favor it.



More importantly... I'm just trying to figure this one out. Who benefits from this, who would do it, and why?

The officer and the department both face massive criminal and civil liabilities due to a shooting that neither denies happened and neither denies was intentional (but both deny was unjustified). They gain nothing and stand only to lose greatly. This was a police shooting and not a civilian with a gun, so there's no way to use it to justify gun control legislation. If the officer and department escape without penalty, nothing changes because police are killing several hundred people a year in the US without penalty. If they are hit with the full liabilities they face, nothing changes anyway because police are killing several hundred people a year in the US without penalty and this does nothing for the families of Milton Hall, Charles Ray, Brian Vander Lee, Dennis Gaydos, etc etc etc.

"They" stands only to lose here, nobody else stands to gain except for one family who has to bury a loved one first, and "they" are the only ones who could have done it anyway
 
Rather silly as they are claiming that lack of smoke means that it was staged! Obviously they have never heard of the different rounds and variations of powder.
Irrespective of powder variations - even blank rounds throw out enough smoke so as to be noticeable.

The video is too pixelated and shaky to be able to make out fine details like that anyway.
 
The video is too pixelated and shaky to be able to make out fine details like that anyway.

There is smoke in the video. Here I've stabilized the highest resolution version I could find:

Full resolution stabilized clip attached, YouTube version below
 

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Comparing two frames shows just how misleading the OP video is. It's very low resolution compared to the original. The smoke can be seen in the high res version, but is just lost in the blur and video compression of the low res RT version.

(Note, the above is a scaled animated gif, which is still lower quality than the original video)
 
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I'd also like to point out that in this stabilized version, you can see the taser gun being dragged behind the suspect lending credence to the officer's story.
 
I'd also like to point out that in this stabilized version, you can see the taser gun being dragged behind the suspect lending credence to the officer's story.

I'm not clear on what aspect of "the officer's story" you are talking about.
 
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