Did a gas station display a message on its roadside price sign telling customers, "For your safety have your gun in your hand while visiting this gas station"? No, that's not true: This image was generated by a prank website that allows people to create their own message on a variety of sign images.
The photo appeared in a post (archived here) where it was published on Facebook on March 25, 2021. The post was captioned, "Damn Louisville 7th & Hill 😳😳😳😳😳 for my safety I won't ever go here again lol". The text displayed on the sign read:
For your safety have your gun in your hand while visiting this gas station
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Mar 29 13:32:00 2021 UTC)
A reverse image search for this photo on TinEye shows similar editions of this sign. The earliest images date back to 2008 and show a variety of gas prices and messages. In some versions the watermark has been cropped off, others point to the website where these prank pictures were made, Atom.Smasher.org.
To demonstrate, Lead Stories ran our own test:
