Also from the article:
He also confirmed that the gun was black, but that it looked more like a stick than a gun.
Of course it looked more like a stick than a gun. rubber bands need a tube about 2 inches in diameter to fly down without hitting the sides and stopping, so you make a rubber band gun to hold the rubber band on the outside of the tube. How can we have a thread this long with so few people who know how to make rubber band guns? A replica gun with the band in a hollow tube wouldn't be functional (I tried that when I was a kid).