Normally, I do not get involved in conspiracist thinking. I guess I have a pretty basic world view: it’s round, there were dinosaurs, evolution is real, aliens are not anal probing trailer park drunks, Oswald shot Kennedy, etc.
It was a weird accident that I happened to see Charlie Kirk shot, live. I was looking around at some of the various political channels on youtube and wham! – blood fountain. I was so fascinated by the technical details I forgot to be shocked. Also, Kirk was a piece of shit. It was interesting to see the animation go out of his face when the blood pressure at his brain dropped, which was practically instant, since the shot hit right in the big artery in the left side of his neck. There was also a gross amount of blood and then all the freakout happened.
My thoughts immediately ticked into technical details (my way of “handling” shock) and I concluded that what I was seeing was actually a near miss because no serious shooter aims at the neck – it’s way to small and wiggly. From the blood-spout I was thinking it was a ‘real’ rifle not a jumped-up .22. Someone had aimed and tried for a chest shot, but didn’t take into account that they were at a height, so the bullet hit high and the shooter got lucky and Charlie didn’t. After that, my attitude reverted to a much more reasonable “who gives a shit?” and I went to the shop and did some productive work, while briefly hoping it wasn’t a liberal and reminding myself that liberals tend not to do that kind of thing. By the time I had gotten busy doing things, I had more or less wiped Charlie Kirk’s existence out of my mind, until the fascist right decided to install him as the current generation’s Horst Vessel.
Other than a few bitter Charlie Kirk jokes, I was prepared to forget he had ever existed. Although, I must say, that bullet through the neck sure improved his attitude toward gays and gun violence, which he keeps mum about these days and hasn’t said anything dumb about since.
There was nothing that would trigger conspiracy theory for me; I actually saw some footage of cops taking down a “person of interest” who fortunately survived, then some footage of someone leaving the scene, and other footage of Kirk being loaded into a vehicle to be taken to a hospital. Instagram had a few people pointing out someone standing near Kirk appeared to be signalling but I just ignored that as stupid – play a few rounds of The Spy Game and observe people closely for a while and you’ll realize that it’s easy to conjure suspicious activity out of almost anything. My usual strategy for this kind of thing is to ignore it and it’ll come out in the normal news cycle. So I was not surprised when they found a gun, and had CCTV of someone in suspicious places, etc. I accepted the story that the shooter was a right-wing nut of a different persuasion than Charlie (<— note, the right wing is nowhere near as politically unified as WWII nazis were). That catches us up to now.
So, apparently, someone from ATF (in a bitter competition of incompetence with the massively incompetent FBI labs) attempted to match the bullet to the gun and was unable to establish a solid match. Now, we have to think about Charlie Kirk a bit more. Just a little. I now have questions where before I didn’t give a rat’s ass.
[John Curley show] [video on youtube]
When I saw the shooting, I didn’t think the damage looked like a high-powered rifle. Something like a .308 would have – I expected – left his head attached by a few bits of gristle and nasties, but the back of his neck would have been paste. But, upon thinking about it, it’s pretty clear that the bullet didn’t actually hit very much of Charlie’s neck, just the really important blood-pipe. If the bullet didn’t hit bone or tumble it might have made a pretty neat hole, gone out the back, and wound up somewhere. Charlie was sitting in front of a big printed banner, and one thing you definitely don’t see is a gigantic splat on the banner. So I’m going to say that the damage and outcome is fairly consistent with damn near anything hitting him in that particular spot. A .223 would have had a slightly higher chance of tumbling (they are designed to) but… examine your own neck. You’ll notice there’s an area that’s muscle and goo and pretty soft. You could poke a hole through that and have all the squirts come out the front if the front hole offered less resistance to the blood pressure. There’s some muscle in the back, that holds our heads up (Charlie’s would have been tense at that moment) so the front of the neck is squishy and the back isn’t.
Someone had to look pretty carefully, I bet, to find that bullet. There’s a parking area and a concrete wall, which would have been the backstop after the bullet went out the printed sign. It probably disintegrated into small pieces. This was not a wee little .223, it was a .30-06, and there would have been a mark in the parking lot or concrete, and some chunks of stuff that went flying, splat.
To me, there are a few important questions that dismantle any conspiracy: was there a .30″ hole in the sign, or a .22″ hole? The ATF bullet analysis would have probably been marginally reliable because I’m going to bet the bullet was severely damaged from hitting concrete or macadam; it probably looked new coming out the other side of Charlie. Once a bullet hits stone, it’s going to get messed up.
I’m going to write this off as conspiracist thinking for a couple of reasons – but I’d love your opinion – finding a bullet that was “inconsistent” with the rifle, for me, would be finding a .223 bullet, a .223 hole in the backdrop, and a roughly .223 hole in Charlie. Those would be really “inconsistent” with a .30-06. On the other hand, what it sounds like is that it’s hard to find a non-bunged part of the bullet to do a bore print from. The “science” of bore-prints is not great but it’s not worth discarding completely. However, it is not out of the question that a bullet can be matched to a gun if the bullet that hit something is in pretty good shape. Even broad consistency, in my opinion, is good enough. How many lands does the rifle barrel have? What shape are they? Is the firing pin mark off center by even a fraction of an inch, and if so how much? (The firing pin of a rifle is pretty consistent unless it’s really really really worn out, in which case its inconsistency would be a fingerprint).
So it sounds like for a conspiracy to be in play, there’s some explaining to do about the rifle casings (ATF will have test-fired the rifle and can compare the pin-prints with the empty casing found at the scene) and the hole sizes sound consistent and the calibre is consistent. If the number of lands (the “innies” made in the bullet, “outies” in the barrel) didn’t match, or something like that, then we’d be able to get all excited. ATF would, presumably, know this, and not get all conspiratorial about it unless there was something highly unusual like polygonal rifling marks in the bullet and an old 4-land Mauser-style barrel.
The Spy Game: play with a friend. For extreme boredom. Sit somewhere, pick a person in your surroundings, and analyze their actions as if they were a spy. Are they completing a hand-off? Is their disguise suspicious? Are they strapped? How many other people in the area are there to back them up? etc. It can get really cool until the time you actually spot actual airport security in mufti and you’re wondering why a normal Boston cop is carrying an H&K MP5.
Mechanical matches to a gun make more sense. The action has to grab the round from a magazine with little metallic teeth against brass, then when it fires, the shape of the chamber is impressed on the brass, the extractor leaves marks in the brass, etc. Also, the firing pin as I mentioned above. “Mauser-type” rifle covers everything from 1898 to the 1940s and machining differences would result in subtle differences in the casing. I have a Swedish Mauser made by Carl Gustaf arms works in 1898, and a casing from that would look very different from one out of a WWII K98. For one thing, the Swedish Mauser is chambered in an absurd round: 6.5×55 nobody makes them. Again “consistent” – if the bullet found was a .30-06 that had been fired out of a rifle with polygonal rifling, and the gun was a Swedish Mauser that had been re-chambered with a modern .30-06 barrel, then there’s no conspiracy. This is all within what I would expect, competency-wise, for ATF.
I think modern Nazis can’t read English very carefully.
The finding was that they could not establish the connection.
That does NOT mean that they established that there was no connection.
It just means that the bullet got too messed up to analyze, so they don’t know anything.
So this is absolutely not a reason to look for conspiracy.
Marcus has explained that the bullet probably got messed up by the wall. So it’s very reasonable that nothing was concluded.
Postulating a second gun is no more necessary than postulating outer-space alien demons.
No serious person needs to think about this. So of course the neo-Nazi crowd will dwell on it.
Too bad for them. They don’t get to blame everyone else for the fact that sometimes the evidence isn’t clear.
Reality is not always as clear cut as a TV show.
Meanwhile, Trump is trying to pump up this season of The Apprentice by replacing AG Bondi with her own apprentice. Same stuff, different people.
wait john curley from that cheesy early evening tourism news show on seattle tv. .. doin real news.. ?
i looked up a bit more, apparently he’s at least right wing (not full on fash – but i didn’t dig deep), spending most of his podcasts bitching about progressive laws related to taxing businesses or millionaires.
I watched Highlander (1986) last night, so I am an expert on beheadings, but all those were done by sword. Also, you could easily tell when they changed camera view and substituted the fake head with a wig. Maybe Kirk should have worn a wig.
I did not see it live, but I did see replays of it. Loading him up for a trip to the hospital was futile. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. The amount of blood loss that quickly would have been near-instant death.
The bullet did not exit according to the coroners report. It hit the artery and lodged just under the skin on the left side. I seem to recall that deer hunting ammunition is designed to tumble on impact for maximum ‘take down’. He bled out in minutes at most and was pretty much just transported to the hospital morgue.
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As someone who use to hunt with a 30-06, I can assure you this guy’s neck would not put up enough resistance to stop a bullet from one, let alone having it becoming “lodged” anywhere unless perhaps it was fired from 800 yards away or something. In my experience, the only animal robust enough to stop a 30-06 round from through-and-through was a Wyoming moose and then, only because of its massive skull. The constitution of a human neck is nothing compared to the fleshy parts of a wild ungulate. Something smells if a 30-06 was really used and the coroner says the bullet did not exit. I mean, how far away was the shooter?
(I was born into hunting — glad to say I gave it up many decades ago.)
I tried to find that morticians video that mentioned the coroners report, but she seems to have removed it. She does have one debunking the claims that there wasn’t an autopsy, and another explaining why CK looks like a mannequin after embalming.
I watched the bloodless version of the video to see the trajectory, and my immediate thought was ‘deer hunting rifle’ based merely on the sound of the gunshot. If Charlie hadn’t happened to turn at that moment he would have been hit in the chest instead of the neck.
Tethys@#6:
The bullet did not exit according to the coroners report. It hit the artery and lodged just under the skin on the left side
Now, that, I find ridiculous. If there is anything about this story that makes me think “conspiracy!” now we are into it. A .30-06 will make a hole through a moose. No matter how much secret knob-sucking Charlie was doing, his neck was not muscular enough to stop a .22 or .223 let alone a game round. The hit was on the left side and, yes, it went right between the muscles in the front of the neck and hit the artery. Behind that artery is about 4″ of muscle and some tendons and stuff, none of which would slow down or distory a .30-06 bullet. I say this with certainty.
(It is the coroner’s claim that I am arguing with, not you) Also, one of the un-addressed topics in the whole Charlie Kirk conspiracy thing is, “who gives a fuck enough about Charlie Kirk to fake his death?” Was the whole idea to humiliate the guy by faking his death and then having him living in secret, in some skull-shaped island, watching TV images of his wife acting like utter trash and crying crocodile tears? Can you imagine what an utterly embarrassing situation Charlie would find himself in? Who’d want to do that to him?
johnson catman@#5:
Loading him up for a trip to the hospital was futile
Literally, you could see the lights go out. It was pretty cool, so long as you’re a horrible person.
Reginald Selkirk@#4:
I watched Highlander (1986) last night, so I am an expert on beheadings, but all those were done by sword.
Well, that theory merits some consideration.
OK, there, I considered it – now what?
A highlander-style contest makes more sense than any of the other reasons I’ve heard for why another right-winger would want him dead.
I should probably go back and re-post my piece about how being against something doesn’t mean you’re for something else. The right wing is (in my opinion) severely draining its fondness for Trump and authoritarian violence. They don’t have an actual world-view of a USA that they can agree they want to build, except that it’s white racist. That’s not a political philosophy, it’s a complaint. As we have seen, once they realize they have even a tiny bit of power, the Trumpistas fall gleefully to pissing on eachother’s shoes. Christian nationalism … wow, though, we’re going to have to stomp that crazy shit somehow. Good news is that they’ll do half of the work themselves.
dennyk@#7:
Something smells if a 30-06 was really used and the coroner says the bullet did not exit. I mean, how far away was the shooter?
120M or something like that. As you can tell by my post, I assumed it went through him, hardly noticing his presence, and exploded on tarmac or buried itself in something soft.
I was correcting the sights on my .308 at 200M once, years ago, and used a mark on a large oak tree as a reference. To my horror, the bullets tore gigantic exit holes in the other side of 3 feet of fresh oak. I feel worse about what I did to the tree than I do about Charlie Kirk. Remember, he used to talk all that martyrdom stuff. He was begging for it.
[Edit: a point about this – there are various kinds of bullets. Let’s assume for argument that the default is military ball. That’s a bullet-shaped bullet with a copper jacket around lead or nowadays some less toxic alloy. It is pointy and copper is surprisingly tough under impact, and military ball tends to poke clean, crisp, holes in things. If military ball hits your pelvis, it pokes a clean, crisp hole in your pelvis. Then there are unstable bullets like the .223 that AR-15s fire. Those were designed during the Vietnam war to tumble, so when they hit a person, or went through some plants and hit a person, they’d tear a nasty irregular hole. I have long suspected that whoever designed the .223 simply designed a crap round and claimed it was supposed to have shitty ballistics, low range, and nominal but not good accuracy. Then you get into hunting bullets, such as hollow tip, where the copper jacket is designed to split open under impact and the tip of the round has a hollow indentation. If one of those rounds hits a blogger in the neck, the hydrostatic pressure starts to peel back the copper jacket and expand the tip and the blogger will really come apart. My friend Sazz said he shot a guy in Vietnam from 400 yards away with a .300 w/m boat tail hollow point and it more or less turned the guy inside out. I have seen this sort of effect but not firsthand. Then you get to frangible bullets and expanding bullets, which are designed to blossom open and transmit as much energy to the target as possible, instantly. If someone had shot Charlie Kirk with a Glaser slug or a Black Talon, it would have ripped his head off and sent it flying somewhere. And then there are the rounds that are just high energy. When I was in college one of my friends obtained a block of armored glass – cool stuff. Naturally, we had to shoot it. .22 did nothing. 9mm made little splats. Dave’s Colt Python .44 magnum made a hole in it and knocked it flying. Then, one of the guys shot it with a “Brown Bess” – .75 cal smoothbore muzzle loader. Basically, the armored block went “splat”]
@ Marcus
I agree but the bullet was on a downward trajectory, and clearly did not exit. It could have tumbled right through his heart and lungs. I’ve seen deer get shot by 30.06 at much closer range, with little blood and no exit wounds. They flinch, walk a few steps, and fall.
If you a hunting deer for food, you don’t use a round that would cause maximum tissue damage. It ruins too much meat.
Tethys@#13:
If you a hunting deer for food, you don’t use a round that would cause maximum tissue damage. It ruins too much meat.
Yeah, but I don’t know what’s best for bloggers.
I didn’t pay too much attention to the details when this happened, especially all the nonsense being spouted about this like every other poilitically motivated assassination attempt.
I felt pretty certain the neck shot was a “lucky miss” – probably aiming center mass (especially if a background in hunting- don’t they typically aim for the heart/lungs?), and was off target. Maybe partially do to shooting from a height, but probably not if it was only ~100 meters or so. Also, “high and to the right” is a common category of miss (I think due to trigger control and breath control, but it’s been a couple decades…), which would fit this shot.
I was a medium machine gunner for a bit whilst enlisted, and I believe the NATO 7.62mm is pretty similar to 30.06, so I’m absolutely at a loss for how that would not exit the body. 7.62 rounds will punch clean through cinderblocks, and chew up brick walls. even hitting a vertebra, it would still punch clean through a roided out NFL football player’s neck.
This is weird, and mildly interesting, but mostly I’m just glad that fascist isn’t spewing his hatred anymore.
I want to say first I’m not an expert on guns. I don’t like them and don’t want them around me. The guns themselves are harmless if handled correctly and with the proper respect. I grew up with half a dozen of them locked up and ammo in a safe on the other side of the house. But I’ve since noticed that a lot of people who like guns are willfully ignorant of proper handling. They’re probably a vocal minority but I don’t care to find out the hard way.
I do understand enough about physics to get that “thing going very fast in one direction” wants to keep going that way in general. And this is very unlikely but is there any chance the bullet hit something else and bounced? A ricochet? Or am I just speaking from ignorance and that’s what all you more knowledgeable people were already quietly assuming?
The news story about the ATF being unable to match the bullet to the gun states that the bullet was recovered at autopsy. The video concurs that it did not exit. You would definitely notice if it had.
A 30.06 gun and (probably Springfield) ammo used is the most common big game hunting gear for long distance scoped hunting.