Perplexity About No Apparent Exit Wound

What happened to the purported .30-06 bullet that struck Charlie Kirk in the neck?

For my third true crime book, The Meaning of Malice, I analyzed the death of a young man who purportedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the right side of his chest with a .243 caliber deer rifle. The bullet did massive damage to multiple organs in his chest, but to my surprise, it did not—according to the Dallas County Medical Examiner—pass through his chest and exit his body. Instead, the soft-point hunting round fragmented and was stopped before it exited.

Researching this case taught me to appreciate that the action of a bullet striking a human body can be very surprising. Nevertheless, the purported action of the purported .30-06 bullet that struck Charlie Kirk in the neck seems especially perplexing.

A 150-grain, .30-06 bullet's energy at 150 yards from the muzzle varies by ammunition, but a common hunting cartridge has an estimated value of approximately 1,800-2,000 foot-pounds (with the bullet traveling at about 2500 feet per second). In other words, the .30 caliber (.30 inch diameter) metal projectile struck his neck with sufficient kinetic energy to move a 2,000 pound mass a linear distance of one foot.

Thus, it is indeed hard to understand how Charlie’s neck could have stopped a projectile with this much kinetic energy.

If I were investigating the murder, I would consider the hypothesis that Charlie was shot with a weapon equipped with a suppressor and loaded with a subsonic cartridge to further reduce the sound. I have seen footage of someone firing a rifle with this setup, and the shot was amazingly quiet. The effective range of such a weapon is about 100 yards or less, and the shooter must be very skilled.

However, such a setup could fire a subsonic projectile that would penetrate a human neck without passing through it. In this scenario, the actual assassin (firing the suppressed rifle) hypothetically coordinated the timing of his shot with someone else firing a normal (supersonic and loud) rifle cartridge into the air at the same time to create a distraction or red herring.

In a functioning society in which the people trust their authorities—including their medical examiners—it would be easy to discover what happened and to disclose at least a preliminary report that would satisfy most reasonable people. The trouble our Republic is facing now is that so many of us no longer trust our federal and state authorities to tell us the truth.

For example, we have strong grounds for suspecting that medical examiners are not diligently investigating (with the proper analytic methods) unexpected, fatal cardiac arrests in young people to determine if they were caused by vaccine-induced myocarditis.