By: Kayleigh Hamilton
People apparently will say anything about Donald Trump.
Whether it’s true or not doesn’t seem to matter for some folks.
And one piece of fake news just spread like wildfire about Trump confiscating guns.
Donald Trump has certainly not been perfect on the gun issue, but it would be silly to think that he’s going to do something extreme like confiscate people’s guns.
He has far too much support from the gun community and too many ties to gun organizations to make an extreme move like that, and he almost certainly wouldn’t even want to anyway.
But many people don’t like Trump, and unfortunately there is a small but vocal minority of them who will do or say anything to tear him down, even if it is false.
That seems to be what prompted some individual to post something fake on X, formerly Twitter, that made it look like Trump was planning to seize the firearms of anyone who opposes him.
This is not true, and Trump is not planning to do that. Fortunately the post was exposed as a fake, but not before it made the rounds and got some people very worried.
According to The Dispatch, “An image depicting a memo addressed to President Donald Trump from his longtime ally Roger Stone discussing plans to ‘confiscate guns of anyone deemed to be an ‘enemy of the state’’ has recently gone viral across Facebook, X, and Bluesky. However, Stone has on several occasions said the memo is fraudulent and not from him.”
This fake story was unfortunately taking advantage of people’s fears about Trump and making them believe something untrue.
There is not going to be a nationwide gun confiscation anytime soon, certainly not with Trump in office, and people should be more discerning about what they read on the internet.
The article continues, “An X user named ‘Anonymous’ with more than 5 million followers tweeted an image on Tuesday of the memo. In a response to that tweet, another X user said, ‘Remember when I told you that Trump would eventually start disarming the public to prevent a constitutionally organized militias from removing him?’ The user, with more than 100,000 followers on X, added, ‘I predicted this because Hitler did the same thing after consolidating power & Trump has followed Hitler’s plan closely so far!’ Other users have shared the memo in recent days. ‘Like I tried to warn MAGA about before, dictators don’t like a population having gun rights,’ tweeted one X user with more than 77,000 followers.”
Clearly many of the people who were duped by this are people who don’t critically think through the things that they see online.
There is a shocking amount of false information that goes around the internet, and people will often just believe it at face value if it “seems right” and aligns with their politics.
But this should serve as a lesson that not every story that aligns with your political views is necessarily true, and people should take everything with a grain of salt.