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.