571
Charlie Kirk bullet analysis finds no conclusive link to rifle found near scene
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
571 points (97.7% liked)
News
36889 readers
3609 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have read somewhere that the whole "bullet forensics" process is mostly pseudoscience anyway. A quick search found this article:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-field-of-firearms-forensics-is-flawed/
If a shell casing wasn't ejected on the scene (like with a bolt-action not cycled) then all they would have to analyze is the what's-left-of-bullet which is possibly just a mess of lead and copper. May or may not have rifling marks left on it
Yeah, shits not like on TV.
In fact, one of the big reason it's like that on TV, is just so when cops lie in real life, idiots believe them.
They consistently tell suspects "we know your gun fired the bullet" but they don't, at most for handguns they can say "a glock fired it" because they use weird octagon rifling.
Matching it to a specific firearm is impossible unless the barrel is real fucked up in a unique way.
A 30-06 will have such massive deformation, I'd be shocked if any rifling is identifiable.
That doesn't mean the person they claim is the shooter really is tho, all types of shit happened immediately after that only make sense if there was a cover up.
But anyone expecting a bullet to be "matched" to a rifle been watching too much CSI
Which really sucks because the juries are all full of tv forensics knowledge, so when cops lie or bend the truth I bet they eat it up
I was so sad when I found out she was a fake Goth Girl.
Not as bad as when I met Elvira at a signing in the '00s and a middle aged blond woman wearing Mom Jeans and a sweater had taken her place.
Now I'm older and realize that Elvira is very busy and can't be everywhere at once, so that's why she hires helpers to fill in for her sometimes.
🤭
Is that the scene the other fellow 'helps' by also typing on the same keyboard?! 🤣
Lovely duet
I'm somewhat of a visual basic GUI expert myself
Yeah, and another guy "solves" it by unplugging the computer.
Yeah the boomer.
Basically CBS is just Boomer Copaganda.
Pick any govt agency with an acronym and CBS probably made a show from it.
It always was, but now that MAGA owns it, it's getting really bad. They showed up to a murder scene, and it turns out to be some version of law enforcement, and they had to have a forced scene where they all gathered around the body and got emotional about someone they don't know, simply because he was some cop adjacent person, then got back to work.
Also, all the bad guys are now Muslims and terrorists and immigrants and such. I was expecting that.
I did notice on NCIS that they are still saying Department of Defense and SecDef. Maybe CBS doesn't approve of Department of War.
The whole CBS line-up is turning into government copaganda - NCIS, FBI, CIA, Marshals, etc.
The article describes a fragment, which is beyond mere deformation. That's unsurprising with a high-velocity rifle round and would typically be impossible to conclusively match to the weapon that fired it. It could be possible to exclude a particular weapon (wrong caliber, obviously different rifling, etc...).
They don't seem to be denying fragmentation/massive deformation. In fact, the crux of their comment relies on that fragmentation.
The point is that, with the amount of force in applied to fragment this bullet, we do not see a similar amount of force applied to Charlie's neck. There was no large exit wound, and the projectile did not appear to impact his spine.
That massive deformation of the bullet comes from massive force, that didn't happen to kirk's neck.
Have you even looked at the evidence?
Article says "fragment". Have you seen otherwise?
Did the bullet stop in some conveniently placed ballistics gel behind Kirk?
That round would have turned his neck into hamburger.
Hunting rifles like that are usually going to make a small entrance wound and larger exit wound. I haven't seen exactly what happened to kirk because I don't like to watch people die. But I can say from experience with deer hunting that it's plausible for that rifle to make a narrow wound channel through a person, while being extremely deadly to them, not making a huge wound outside.
Basically those high powered rounds are made to penetrate well through large animals, tougher than humans. Expanding and deforming of the round is intended to begin well after penetration, unlike the way handgun bullets are designed.
So I think it's totally possible that Robinson did it even though the bullet isn't able to be matched
The demonstrations I have seen with this rifle, with all types of ammunition including Old World War One ammunition that is less powerful, there's a fist sized exit wound and bones in the neck would be broken.
But there are other problems with the story, for one thing they claim he disassembled the rifle in one minute and put it in a tiny pack and jumped off the roof with it, and he does not otherwise have it hidden in his pants you can tell. For another thing they brought a bomb / gun sniffing dog through the area where they later found the gun, right by it, the sheriff did, and did not find this weapon, but then the FBI shows up and finds it in the first minute. And obviously they claimed he disassembled it because there is no possible way he could have been carrying a rifle in the video footage of him leaving the scene, but they find it fully assembled. Rather odd, one could say incredible. As in not a credible story. Utah police know it's a bullshit story this is an FBI fucking Frame Up.
Neat - that in no way answers my question.
Why are you asking me, I am denying it was that gun at all. The story is bs^3.
I'm asking you because you said
It sounds like you're saying the bullet wouldn't have been deformed and that you've seen some evidence to that end.
I never said that. I said that round would have turned his neck into hamburger.
That at that range it can shoot almost entirely through a half inch of steel plate. It will pulverize haunches of beef back to back, kill an elk or a grizzly bear.
I think the guy I replied to or somebody further upstream what you quoted though.
This isn't you?
https://sh.itjust.works/post/57725699/24594984
Who is me, look at my fucking username and tell me if it's me what the fuck are you asking? You want me to do the work? I'm busy.
My dude - it's the same user name. They both link to your account and both messages show in your history.
??
Same with fingerprinting and blood spatter analysis. There is very little within the field of forensics that is backed by science. Fingerprints are not admissible evidence in many courts.
not anymore fingerprinting, a study came out recently how fingerprints can be very similar to one or another
"We're 100% certain the one responsible for destroying the eucalyptus bush is either you or this koala. Why don't you just admit it now and save yourself some trouble?"
*munches on leaves*
It was the koala!
Eats shoots and leaves!
The sinister panda that has been lurking around the scene of the crime chuckles to itself and capers off.
gangster koala
have you not heard what terrible beings koalas are?
I searched and couldn't find any information about fingerprints not being admissible in any courts. I've found a lot of stories about how they aren't 100% accurate (closer to 95-99 percent), but not one story about how fingerprints were not admissible.
Where are these "many courts" that don't accept fingerprints?
I seem to recall that the debate is more about partial prints, which are often all that's found at a scene. A "100% match" of a small part of a print isn't the same as a 100% match to the whole print. And even full prints can be of varying quality: the print can be smeared to varying degrees, or on a substrate that allows for diffusion of the print once it's made (e.g,, an oily surface).
Did you try?
https://science.psu.edu/news/barriers-use-fingerprint-evidence-court-unlocked-statistical-model
Fingeprints are not admissable, just some guy's opinion, because fingerprint identification has no real basis in science. Science is not based purely on someone's opinion. And no, they aren't 95-99% accurate (especially because it is just some guy eyeballing it), when tested by giving multiple "experts" the same set of prints, the "experts" come to disagreeing conclusions about if the prints match or not over half the time.
Oh, come on. You're just being pedantic. Fingerprints are allowed as evidence in probably every court in the world, as long as they have been reviewed by an expert. Yes, technically it is the expert's testimony that is the evidence, but that is the case with most "evidence." Prosecutors don't just show the jurors a medical chart and tell them to interpret that evidence. They have a doctor give testimony on why that medical chart means X, Y, and Z.
(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4008377/)
8% false negative and 0.1% false positive... so 92% accurate in that study. Just slightly better than your "half the time."
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/05/nist-study-measures-performance-accuracy-contactless-fingerprinting-tech
Computers can achieve 60% accuracy with contact-less scanning and 99.5% with contact scanning. A phone app can get 95% accuracy. Again, somewhat better than your "half the time."
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/history-and-legacy-latent-fingerprint-black-box-study
7.5% false negative and 0.1% false positive.
https://www.uclalawreview.org/reliable-application-of-fingerprint-evidence/
FBI study showed 99.7% accuracy, and Miami Police study showed 95% accuracy.
Partial prints are much less accurate than full prints, but to say that fingerprint analysis is so inaccurate that it isn't allowed in many courts is disingenuous. Expert testimony on fingerprint analysis is allowed in every court, which is what a normal person would mean when they say fingerprints are allowed as evidence.
There are points of similarity in fingerprinting, and every state has their own number of points to be a match. They all accept them as evidence.
You mean they bring in an "expert" to testify that the fingerprints match... and when you give 2 "experts" the same set of fingerprints to compare, they literally come to disagreeing conclusions in 50% of tests
It is not a scientific or analytical process with scientifically identified "points of similarity", its just a person who is deemed an "expert", who looks at 2 fingerprints and says "yeah these look similar, and they look similar in X different places so 👍"
There are the actual standards, then there are prosecutors perverting them. Prosecutors are the least trustworthy people on the planet. Total pieces of shit, no argument here. But fingerprints themselves aren't junk science as I've read, not like past hair analysis, blood spatter, bite mark analysis, 911 voice recording analysis, or any number of other junk sciences. As I understand it.
But don't let me dismiss your point out of hand, what gave you this opinion, did you read something as such, you have a source on this?
And even if it does, they'll be so mangled as to be useless. Like you could say "ok the rifle has four grooves at 1:8” but you've got a fraction of a bullet that was squished into an entirely different shape on impact.
They have a sort of computer-aided 3-D reconstruction process, but that’s pretty sketchy, too.
"I asked ChatGPT and it said that gun fired the bullet."
"Youre absolutely right!!"
Enhance!