Anonymous Official Downplays Reports of Statements Engraved on Ammunition

A report in the Wall Street Journal earlier today indicated that investigators had found the rifle used in the shooting and with it some engraved ammunition. The ammunition was “engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology.”

CNN issued a report which was less concrete about what was on the cartridges. They published a story mentioning “cultural phrases” but not specifying what those phrases were about.

Now the NY Times is reporting that an unnamed law enforcement official is walking back those reports, saying they hadn’t been confirmed by the ATF.

A preliminary and unverified report circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that ammunition recovered with the rifle used to kill Charlie Kirk appeared engraved with statements “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.”

A senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that the report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.

In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information…

Several cartridges, including what appeared to be a spent round in the rifle’s chamber, were recovered. The weapon and ammunition are being traced by A.T.F. analysts in West Virginia, but the evidence has not yet led to a person of interest, the law enforcement officials said.

At this point we have more questions than answers. Start with the one Ed raised this morning. If the shooter was engraving the cartridges with specific political messages then clearly he wanted his message to get out. So why take the rifle off the roof and discard it in the woods? Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just leave it in place and run?

But I also have questions about this new anonymous warning. The senior law enforcement official is clearly insinuating the leaked reports are wrong. At the same time, he’s not quite denying there were engraved messages on the cartridges. He seems to be saying those messages exist but may have been misinterpreted.

At this point it’s probably not worth speculating what this could mean. But in the broadest terms it’s hard to imagine how someone who carried out a targeted assassination would turn out to be a fan of the message being spread by the target of that violence. I’m not sure how we could misinterpret the murder itself, but It’s a crazy world and almost anything is possible I guess.

Also, the fact that one person is leaking information to Steven Crowder and someone else is leaking contrary information to the NY Times suggests an internal battle over how this gets framed in public. We’ve seen this sort of thing before. Remember the FBI’s claim that there was no clear motive for the attempted assassination of Republicans at a baseball field back in 2017?

We should an answer to these questions about Kirk’s shooter fairly soon. He will be caught and we will get a look at whatever was engraved on those cartridges. I’m content to wait until I can see it for myself before drawing any conclusions. Right now it looks like…well, what it looks like. But we’ll get the facts soon enough. Getting to the truth is what matters here, not matter what that is.

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