The conspiracy theorists regarding the Charlie Kirk murder are quite happy about this
This article appeared in the Daily Mail concerning the trial of Tyler Robinson. Its headline reads “Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims.”
As you might imagine, many of the pundits who think Tyler Robinson is being framed (whether or not they are of the ISRAEL DID IT variety) are writing about this (see, for example, Candace Owens’ reaction).
But his defense attorneys now argue that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ‘was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr Robinson.’
The defense team may now offer the ATF firearm analyst’s testimony as exculpatory evidence, they said in a motion filed on Friday to push the preliminary hearing back at least six months, Fox News reports.
The Fox article has nothing about the allegations regarding the bullet evidence. And the Daily Mail article has nothing more about it than the quote I posted, despite the incendiary headline.
Note that it doesn’t say the gun was ruled out; it says the Bureau was unable to identify it to the rifle, which sounds as though the evidence about the bullet was probably ruled “inconclusive.”
The article didn’t add that this is not all that unusual in forensics cases. But see this article from a forensics periodical:
A forensic firearms examiner, when comparing two bullets or two cartridge cases, for example one an “unknown” or “questioned” (from crime scene) and the other a “known” (from a suspect weapon), will in the U.S. ordinarily follow The Association of Firearms and Toolmarks Examiners (AFTE) or the Uniform Language for Testimony and Reports (ULTR) guidelines issued by the Department of Justice, and arrive at one of three major conclusions: “identification”—the bullets came from the same gun, “elimination”—the bullets came from different guns, or “inconclusive”—the bullets might have come from the same gun, might have come from different guns. … The AFTE criteria further divide the Inconclusives into three sub-categories labeled A, B and C, where A leans to without reaching an Identification, C leans to without reaching an Elimination, and B is neutral.
We have no idea which, if any, of these designations were given the bullets in this case. Nor do we know if any other forensic scientists also examined the bullet and gun evidence. The media isn’t saying.
More here about the science of bullet matching:
We always knew it was never a perfect science. We knew that not every bullet could be traced to a specific firearm. Microscopic tool marks left behind on a fired bullet as it travels down the barrel were never really seen as “a firearm’s DNA,” as some have termed it. Bullets fired into non-homogenous substances such as the human body can impact muscle, bone, clothing, and internal objects, all of which can deform the bullet, making identification difficult.
We knew that—our trust in television aside—not every bullet can be traced to a specific firearm. For example, some rifles, such as a particular Canadian law enforcement agency’s patrol carbine, are manufactured with hammer-forged barrels that do not machine the rifling grooves in a barrel in the traditional way. Instead, they use a hardened die inserted into a barrel blank that is pounded by tens of thousands of powerful hydraulic hammer blows to form and shape the barrel to exact dimensions. This process may make it difficult to come to a conclusive decision about the precise firearm a bullet was fired from
Other firearms manufacturers that use non-traditional rifling may not leave enough marks on the bullet that can be matched to a specific barrel even if recovered fully intact. …
A 2009 report by the National Academies of Science first called into question how ‘exact’ the science was and how there were few—if any—scientific, double-blind research studies to back up the claims made by examiners in court. The report pointed out that, unlike fingerprints, bullet examination protocols don’t specify how many points of similarity are needed to form a conclusive opinion.
A 2016 report to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) concluded that firearms analysis did not meet the criteria for scientific validity, which requires repeatability and reproducibility.
There is no question that further research is needed.
In another widely quoted research paper from 2022, the Ames II Study, 173 firearms examiners compared thousands of fired cartridge cases and bullets. The overall rate of errors and false positives in the study was considered to be under one per cent.
Critics of the Ames II Study point out that the three categories the examiners used, “Identified,” “Eliminated” or “Inconsistent,” skewed the result numbers substantially. Being able to answer “inconclusive” and still be scored as perfect meant error rates of under one per cent were, in fact, closer to 30 to 40 per cent. Critics also pointed out that examiners disagreed on a number of matches made by their own colleagues, and even the same examiner reached different conclusions when given the same test batch twice. Critics considered that the large number of “inconclusive” results was like answering every multiple-choice question on a test with “I don’t know” and still scoring perfectly.
I am not a ballistics expert, to say the least. But just twenty minutes or so of research revealed all of that.
The Daily Mail article does detail some of the other evidence against Tyler Robinson, which is simply overwhelming.
I wrote all of the above prior to listening to this video, which answers some of the questions – apparently based on information that was released two weeks ago and which the Daily Mail article’s author didn’t see fit to mention (nor did any of the conspiracy theorists that I read on X). The gist of the video is that the autopsy results revealed a fragmented bullet that would be very difficult to match to a weapon. The fragmentation also accounted for the lack of an exit wound (no exit wound is something the conspiracy theorists often cite as suspicious). Here’s the video:
The woman in the video is lawyer Andrea Burkhart.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men … couldn’t put the bullet back together again.
Well Utah used to use a firing squad, so some ground truth testing is needed with Charlie’s assassin. Known weapons known ammunition, multiple bullets; can you trace the fragmented rounds back to known weapons?
For the greater the good.
The old saying “The devil is in the details” comes to mind.
I doubt the Candace Owens bunch will think half as deeply about this as you have written.
I wonder if the Kirk assassin used a hollow point round?
This new information is going to create a lot of noise and confusion from folk who don’t understand how bullets work. Bullets are great hole punches and then, lots of stuff happens inside where the meat and bone are contacted by the bullet, entering faster than the speed of sound, leaving a wake in the moist tissue and fragmenting when a bone is encountered. I have owned several 30-06 rifles and now I am down to just two of these good rifles in this great old caliber. The 30-06 round was designed in 1906 for the U.S. military and it was used in WWI, WWII and Korea in both rifles and machine guns, it is a very effective round, both in full metal jacket and in the various ballistic tips used for hunting large game.
Going back over 25 years ago I was using a 30-06 shooting a nice size buck deer here in Texas. I was trying for a heart lung shot and the deer moved causing me to hit the front shoulder at an angle and it shattered the bullet through the chest cavity and into the far rib cage causing me to lose a fair amount of good meat that was peppered with small bits of copper and lead and no misshapen bullet to recover, at least not much of one. Usually shooting other deer, I could find the bullet, rather misshapen and often times bent up a lot, under the skin on the far side, as I butchered the deer but not that one time.
I am in now my 80’s and I no longer hunt deer, mostly dove and monthly I compete in Steel Challenge with pistol and rifle and while I am no expert on any of this gun stuff, I have had over 70 years of shooting guns and I know things happen when fast projectiles hit things, living things. I am down to less than a dozen center fire rifles and a half dozen or so pistols and some shotguns less than 30 overall and from my point of view I would suggest we hold off, deciding what happened, until we have a whole lot more factual information.
Thanks for this research, Neo. I did wonder when I saw the headline. As is often the case, the devil is in the details.
Over the years I’ve watched a lot of murder mystery/crime dramas of every type. Examination of a bullet is often written into a script and used as evidence or evidence unavailable due to bullet condition. I don’t think I’ve ever seen “evidence unavailable” exonerate a defendant.
Robinson is a sexual deviant with leftoid attitudes toward political dissent. Our opponents are fond of such people and fancy their status should accord them special dispensations.
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I’m still a participant on one liberal blog. The modal response in the comboxes was “he had it coming to him” (hedged with “well, I wouldn’t have wanted this…”). Partisan Democrats fancy that you dissent from the official idea on campus and you’re asking to be shot to death.
Old Texan:
Very good points.
I wasn’t trying to imply that the bullet fragments could be reassembled sufficiently to prove a match to the rifle used.
Matching bullets to firearms used in a crime is a dramatic trope but IIRC not that common in the real world.
Old Texan:
I’ve been hunting since I was 18; that’s about 50 years or so. I started in a “shotgun slug only” area, and I can safely tell you that a 12-gauge slug will generally go right through a whitetail in into the ground. I never did recover a slug, but every deer hit with one dropped right where it was standing or running.
When I switched to hunting in a rifle zone I was also using a .30-06, usually a 180-grain Federal-brand with a Nosler Partition bullet. I recovered several bullets, but mostly they also passed through the deer, radically mushrooming as they went, and I usually got them from a tree behind the deer. They were generally well-expanded, and about the only rifling present was at the base of the bullet…but I wouldn’t bet dollars to doughnuts that ANYBODY could identify the particular rifle from which they were shot.
The only time I got one fully intact, still expanded, but without any of the petal broken off, was when the buck was standing still in front of a big snowbank. He was only about 50 yards away, and I put a good heart/lung shot through him. He took off running 25 yards down the edge of the clearing, and then another 25 yards through the swamp, and then crashed down. After dragging it out of the swamp and field-dressing, I went over and looked at the snowbank. I found the blood spatter and dug through until I found the remnants of the bullet. It had expanded and was pretty much intact, but there was STILL so little rifling visible that there was no way somebody could tell which particular rifle it came from.
Yup, you could match the bullet type and caliber, but match it to a particular firearm? You’d have better luck with a fortune teller than trying that.
In the DC sniper case they had trouble because the 5.56 mm bullets used fragmented and could not be matched to a particular barrel.
The gist of the video is that the autopsy results revealed a fragmented bullet that would be very difficult to match to a weapon. The fragmentation also accounted for the lack of an exit wound (no exit wound is something the conspiracy theorists often cite as suspicious).
I’m curious what caused the fragmentation. Wasn’t he hit in the neck?
5.56 mm M193 ball ammo tends to penetrate 10 to 15 cm of muscle tissue before fragmentation begins. This happens when the bullet starts to tumble.
You can get very different results depending on the type of bullets used. Unlike 5.56, 30-06 ball seems less likely to fragment. Of course there is a wide range of hunting bullets so just about anything is possible.
For .30-06 you used to be able to get a discarding sabot round that fired a smaller .223 bullet, the same type of bullet used in 5.56 M193 rounds. It had a muzzle velocity of just over 4,000 fps. I expect it would fragment like crazy.
I was wrong, the 55 gr bullet used in the .30-06 Accelerator is a soft point, which makes sense based on the intended application:
https://www.midwayusa.com/product/1002026387?srsltid=AfmBOor8DmJYFW4ZLqnUrtAILyB2sDzd-c1HIJ2f0B0wgB9tVY9Odhzq&pid=220009
Searching google shows that there are youtube videos that suggest this was the type of bullet used to kill Kirk.
The videos I saw show the bullet striking the upper edge of the plate Charlie was wearing and evidently ricocheting up into his neck and likely continuing into his skull.
Looked to me like the plate was too small and too low.