People stream outside State Farm Stadium as they prepare to attend the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21. Photo / Getty Images
It’s a stark and alarming trend: Mass shooters engraving bullet casings with cryptic messages, leading officials to speculate about their motives and, more recently, their political affiliations.
It happened in Dallas, Texas, yesterday. Officials investigating an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that killed one detainee and critically injured two others announced that they had recovered unspent ammunition, with at least one labelled “ANTI-ICE”.
Mass shooters left political messages on guns and ammunition associated with attacks on:
- a Minneapolis Catholic school last month;
- a Nashville Christian school in 2023;
- a grocery store in Buffalo in 2022;
- a Christchurch mosque in 2019;
- and a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
There were also marked shell casings in the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive last year.
And there were inscriptions in the case of Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting this month.
Experts in political violence say that such engravings are a way for shooters to ensure the rationale for their attacks is publicised.
The images’ significance is sometimes obvious, such as swastikas or racist language, but in other cases they’re more obscure, such as online memes not associated with a specific ideology.
“This is very well-established behaviour because they know the writing will be reported even if the manifestos are suppressed,” Renée DiResta, a professor at Georgetown University who researches online influence, said of mass shooters inscribing messages on weapons and ammunition.
DiResta said the media has got better at not highlighting full manifestos, but it’s hard to censor a bullet casing.
“It’s another means by which the messages can reach the public,” she said.
And in some cases, she said, these “memes and messages written for the ‘lulz’ [or lols - online slang for laughs] add another layer of irony and a way to capture attention, by being an inside joke or a source of amusement”.
She noted how soldiers used to chalk or paint messages on artillery shells, such as “To the Axis From U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.” during World War II. And she said that “model of symbolic communication” had been adapted to the online world.
The lack of clarity of recent engravings hasn’t stopped political partisans on both sides from ascribing intent to the perpetrators.
Describing the Dallas shooting investigation in a post on X, FBI Director Kash Patel shared a photo that appeared to show five gold-coloured bullets, one labelled “ANTI-ICE” in blue. Patel wrote that the photo indicated an ideological motive behind the attack.
“These despicable, politically motivated attacks against law enforcement are not a one-off,” he said, citing another recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas.
“It has to end and the FBI and our partners will lead these investigative efforts to see to it that those who target our law enforcement are pursued and brought to the fullest extent of justice.”
No ICE officers were injured in the attack, officials said.
The gunman, who authorities said fatally shot himself as they approached, was later identified as Joshua Jahn, according to four people briefed on the investigation.
Jahn, 29, of Fairview, Texas, last voted in the Democratic primary in 2020, records show.
US President Donald Trump, other GOP officials, and conservative activists seized on the casings as proof that Jahn was “left wing”.
“It has now been revealed the deranged shooter wrote ‘Anti-ICE’ on his shell casings. This is despicable!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, alleging “attacks by Deranged Radical Leftists”.
“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped,” he also wrote.
At an event in North Carolina, Vice-President JD Vance called the gunman a “violent left-wing extremist”, citing the casings and other evidence not yet made public that the shooter was “politically motivated to go after people who are enforcing our border”.
Democratic state Senator Nathan Johnson of Dallas said he had been communicating with state and local investigators about the shooting and that it was too early to say what the shooter’s political ideology or motives were.
“We’ve had incidents where things come out the first day that turn out not to be true,” he said.
Asked about Patel’s X post alleging that anti-ICE messages were carved on bullet casings recovered from the scene, Johnson said, “I want a more thorough airing of the evidence that has come out”.
Johnson noted that after conservative activist Kirk was fatally shot earlier this month in Utah, initial reports of bullet casings with pro-transgender messages ended up being wrong.
Tyler Robinson, 22, who was charged with murder in connection with Kirk’s shooting, has not been co-operating with authorities.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox (Republican) said inscriptions were found on at least four shell casings linked to the Kirk shooting.
One read “Hey fascist! Catch!” and contained words and symbols that were a seeming reference to a video game that’s been interpreted as a satire of fascism.
Others appeared to reference online trolling and memes, including “notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this?” and “If you read this, you are gay lmao”.
A fourth was inscribed with lyrics from Bella Ciao, an Italian anti-fascist anthem that’s also featured in a popular remix, video game and TV show.
Yet Cox and others in the GOP insisted Robinson had a “leftist ideology”, noting his romantic partner - who was co-operating with authorities - was transitioning from male to female.
While the political maelstrom surrounding these recent bullet inscriptions is new, mass shooters inscribing such messages on bullets and weapons is not.
Last month, 23-year-old Robin Westman fatally shot two children inside a Catholic school in Minneapolis after posting YouTube videos showing guns and ammo wrapped in minimalist memes, including one known as “loss”.
Two years ago, Aiden Hale, 28, opened fire on a Christian primary school in Nashville with a rifle inscribed “Hellfire”.
Three years ago, Payton Gendron, 18, wrote racial slurs, references to previous white-supremacist mass murder as well as “White Lives Matter” on his guns before killing 10 black people inside a Tops grocery store in Buffalo.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, the gunman convicted of the deadly shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, scrawled swastikas on ammunition magazines he left at the school.
The following year, when Brenton Tarrant, 28, attacked a mosque in Christchurch, he inscribed anti-Muslim and anti-migration sayings on his rifle and ammunition, some visible as he live-streamed on Facebook.
Jared Holt, a researcher with the online extremism tracking firm Open Measures, said that during the past decade, mass shootings have “taken on a very performative aspect for these perpetrators”.
“There’s a degree to which people that have carried out these kinds of acts have also considered how they will be interpreted, how they will be featured in the news, and what the legacy of what they did will be,” Holt said.
He noted the shooters are motivated by “notoriety and legacy as much as they are any sort of coherent ideology … They almost view their acts as a type of performance art.
“For the communities they participate in, for the general public, for history to look back on.”
Political extremists write on bullets to ensure there’s no confusion about why they wanted to kill, said Victor Asal, a political science professor who researches political violence and extremism at the State University of New York at Albany.
There hasn’t been much research on the topic of bullet messages, he said, but it’s evident that shooters are using this as another way to clarify their reasoning.
“If you write something on the bullet in addition to whatever messages you might have put on YouTube or have in your house or put on social media, you’re making one more message of why this person deserved to die,” he said.
Research that Asal and others have done shows that political violence is rarely motivated by greed or poverty.
“Political violence is usually motivated by ideology or oppression or both,” Asal said.
Such attackers may feel drowned out by social media, said Matthew Krain, a professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio who teaches about large-scale political violence.
In that environment, a picture of a bullet bearing a message is a self-contained and easily understandable statement, he said.
“It could just be out of frustration, but it also guarantees their message gets out there, and they are controlling the narrative,” he said.
- Aaron Schaffer, Razzan Nakhlawi and Will Oremus contributed to this report.
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