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A 14 July 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice claimed more than 80 lives when a man plowed through a large crowd of celebrants with a truck. Almost immediately, gun rights advocates began pointing out that the attacker had killed dozens of people without the use of a gun, prompting inevitable comparisons of calls for more stringent regulation of firearms with the folly of blaming vehicles and drivers for massacres such as the Nice tragedy: Some pundits arguing these points linked to an article published on the web site Political Writing Game as a real-life example of what they were asserting, that now the U.S. would foolishly be implementing truck control as a means of heading off future attacks like the one in Nice: Likely most of these pundits experienced the Political Writing Game article only as previewed on social media, referencing it without opening the underlying link and reading the article through. Had they done so, they might have noticed that the article's opening line identified it as A satirical speculation on how the President will react to the Nice Terrorist Attack (and that its authorship was attributed to Winston Churchill). Political Writing Game describes itself as a discourse-based project, not a news outlet. Although their satirical item about President Obama's plan to ban trucks after the Nice attack was mistaken by some for real news, the site isn't aimed at spreading fake news (unlike the majority of satire pages). The rumor got an additional boost when the web site Joe for America published a post suggesting that President Obama had called for stricter truck control laws, before quickly noting, [o]kay, he didn't do that. Again, readers frequently shared that piece without clicking through to discover that it was purely satirical in intent.
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