NBC News is running a story that claims that a man fired a weapon during the Jan 6 riot:

John Emanuel Banuelos was previously identified by NBC News as a Jan. 6 rioter who told police he had a weapon that day. New footage appears to show him firing it

Emphasis added

The mainstream media doesn’t understand anything about guns and is completely unaware that their claims can be easily disproven. In this case, they’re using the wiggle words “appears to show.” It does show that the idiot was waving a gun in the air and appears to fire it twice. Was it a real gun? We can’t tell from that picture.

If you watch the video referenced in the article, he’s standing precariously on the scaffolding and there is no or very little recoil observed, even with two very quick shots. This indicates that live rounds were not fired. He also doesn’t appear to be concerned about hitting his compatriots just above him. There is a lot of smoke, which is consistent with blanks or a starter pistol. The crowd doesn’t react, which is also inconsistent with live fire, even in a noisy environment — if you’ve ever been near a handgun being fired without your ear protection on, you know how loud that noise can be.

What we do know is that a real firearm firing live rounds wasn’t fired. The data doesn’t lie.

Shotspotter was installed in Washington DC in 2013:

The Post reports that the District is served by a network of 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city. Each sensor, comprised of microphones, software, and a GPS-linked clock, is designed to pick up the unique “impulsive” sounds of gunplay, ignoring the other sounds of the average city. Sensors work in harmony to detect the time and location of shots fired with precision. According to ShotSpotter senior vice president James Beldock, who the Post interviewed for their report, 10 sensors can determine the location of a gun blast to within two feet. This data is then sent back to city officials, who can then dispatch officers to the afflicted areas, in a process that takes 40 seconds on average.

If there had been a shot fired outside on Jan 6, 2021, it would have been picked up by the Shotspotter equipment. It would have been all over the news by the next day that the rioters were armed and fired a shot. Since that reporting never happened and all we have is a grainy picture, we can easily deduce that no gun was fired outside that day.

But we can do better than merely deducing that a shot was not fired due to lack of reporting. The DC Shotspotter data is open source. There were 22 shots detected in Washington DC from 1/6/21 to 1/7/21. None of them were anywhere near the capitol. Click on that link to see the interactive map and play with it yourself.

NBC could have easily checked this data. If you’re jumping onto this story because it aligns with your biases, you’re being played.