When Rifles Don't Penetrate (And Why)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]On September 10th, 2025, I was in the hospital with pneumonia. I didn't have much else to do, so I kept a close watch on the news. When Charlie Kirk was shot that morning, I saw the story right away. Twitter users posted videos of the attack, but the early footage was taken from long range. It didn't look good, but it was hard to tell just how bad it was. I hoped he had survived somehow, and some reports suggested that he had.

[00:00:25]Soon, there was footage taken closer to Charlie. It was very graphic and as soon as I saw it, I lost any hope of a good outcome. My brother was in the hospital room with me at the time, so we really experienced this together. At this stage, you've got to remember there was a manhunt underway, and nobody really knew what happened, so we were trying to piece things together. The media is always eager to pin these kinds of attacks on 223 rifles, specifically AR-15s, but I didn't think the damage that we saw here was consistent with a 223. I suggested to my brother that the shot came from a 308 rifle. Many cartridges are capable of inflicting the same kind of damage, but the 308 is very popular, so to me it seemed the most likely. The wound was so brutal, my brother wondered if the shot might have come from a 7 mm or a 300 Magnum. The news later broke, of course, that the murder weapon was a 306, which pretty much splits the difference between my guess and his. I can't say that either of us was surprised. I'm sure we would have been if the FBI had announced the killer used a 38 snubnse or a black powder musket, but a 306 made a lot of sense to us. Many podcasters had just the opposite reaction. According to them, the key problem with the official narrative about the murder weapon is an early report that surgeons found the bullet inside Charlie's body. It's now been confirmed that those were 30 caliber bullet fragments. Now, a 300 6 is a powerful rifle. Hunters use them to take moose and grizzly bears. A man's neck just isn't going to stop a bullet from a big gun like that. So, if there's no exit wound, a smaller, less powerful gun must have been used. So far, that's been the argument. Lately, that's beginning to change. Well, ballistic testing is a big part of my work. and I'm here to tell you and show you that when influencers say this kind of stuff, they're really speaking from a place of ignorance. In this video, I'm going to give you eight reasons why none of the arguments you've heard against the 300 6 actually work. The loads I test here are not my proposals for what the killer might have actually used in his rifle. I really just want to show you how load choice affects ballistic performance. In the firearms industry, the most popular way to evaluate ammunition performance is ballistic gelatin. And that's what we're going to be working with here. It doesn't simulate exactly what a bullet does to a living target, but it doesn't need to to give us a consistent visible way of comparing the effects of different rounds, loads, and guns. If a bullet penetrates 10 in of ballistic gel and pretty much holds together, that doesn't mean it's going to penetrate 10 in of bone, hide, and tissue. But it does mean it's going to penetrate more bone, hide, and tissue than a bullet that blows up 5 in inside a gel block.

[00:03:16]According to FBI ammunition testing protocol, duty ammunition should penetrate 12 to 18 in of 10% ballistic gelatin. Anything more risks over penetration and a greater risk of harm to bystanders, but anything less may not inflict sufficient damage to the vitals of a human target. This thinking is influential in the world of defensive handguns. And as you can see, most 9mm and 45 caliber defensive hollowpoint ammunition is designed to perform within the FBI parameters. The clear ballistic blocks you see in this footage are each 20 in long, 40 in in total. If a 9mm or 45 can only make it 12 or 18 in through the stuff, I would invite you to guess what sort of cartridge it takes to pass through all of it. Maybe a 4570.

[00:04:06]How about a 50 BMG? Try a 21 caliber sharp, which is more or less a spin-off of a 22 rimfire. Making just 6% of the muzzle energy of a 300 6, it's one of the least powerful rifles you can buy.

[00:04:22]But it can fire a solid bullet with a truncated cone profile through nearly 50 in of gel. And that's our first point.

[00:04:31]Penetration doesn't require power. In certain bullets, underpowered guns can penetrate very well. Our second point is that power by itself does not guarantee penetration. Here's a 500 Bushwhacker rifle, which produces twice the power of a 300 6 and 27 times the power of a 21 Sharp. Yet it only penetrates about the same amount as a 9 mm 16 in because its hollowpoint bullet expands so violently.

[00:05:02]In fact, 500 Smith and Wesson Magnum handgun firing the same bullet with less than onethird the power actually penetrates slightly more. And that brings us to our third point that higher velocities can actually hinder penetration if our bullets aren't up to it. For years, the 300 Weatherbe Magnum was one of the highest velocity rifle cartridges money could buy. It dates all the way back to 1944, same year as D-Day. And when our troops hit the beach at Normandy, they were shooting 150 grain bullets at 2700 to 2,800 ft per second from their M1 rifles. Weatherbee's 300 Magnum can do over 3500 ft per second with the same bullet weight. Anything the 300 6 can do, the 300 can do much faster. Here we shoot a gel block with 110 grain bullet going 3,900 ft pers from the Weatherbeam. The bullet disintegrates and most of the fragments only make it about 5 in in one fragment makes it a little further. It penetrates about 9 in. That's a lot less than a defensive 9 mm round, let alone the 21 sharp, especially when you consider the power difference. But these bullets are very lightly constructed. They're not made to penetrate. It doesn't matter if you shoot them from a 300 Weatherbe or a 300 6 or a 3030, they're going to blow up and turn into little pieces no matter the target. But if we shoot a solid, tough, non-expanding bullet with a similar profile to the 21 caliber we started with, the story changes fast because the power of the rifle is used in a different way. This is a 210 grain solid going 3,000 ft per second in the same 300 weather beam. And it isn't stopped by a gel block or an oak round or a gallon jug of water. And that's point4. When it comes to penetration, the design of the bullet matters more than how fast it's going, how powerful it is, or how big in caliber it may be.

[00:07:00]Five. Not even the caliber of a gun is any guarantee of the caliber of its bullet. As we know from tank guns, there is such a thing as a sabo. This is basically a sleeve which lets you shoot small caliber bullets in a larger caliber gun. For years, Remington marketed their accelerators in 300 6 and other rounds. I have some and they shoot a 55 grain 22 caliber bullet at 3,865 ft per second for my 300 6. The rounds can be fired through any rifle chambered in the cartridge and they closely duplicate a 22250 except they're not quite as accurate. But we actually see about 12 in of penetration here, which is higher than we saw with the 110 grain bullet and the 300 Weatherbe and about what we saw with the 9 mm. And that's 6.

[00:07:47]A smaller caliber bullet does not ensure less penetration. We already saw this with the 21 Sharp. 7. Even when we have the potential for high penetration, bullets can still behave unpredictably.

[00:08:01]It's well known that expanding bullets can open up either too little or too much which causes them to either over or under penetrate depending on the application, but using a solid non-expanding bullet does not guarantee straight or deep penetration. This is a 500 grain solid fired from a 458 Winchester Magnum. A very powerful cartridge. It's made to penetrate huge animals like elephants without expanding, but it destabilizes and gel and breaks right through my table. You can see the same thing going on with this 475 caliber solid. Now, this is the popular M8556 load used by the US military. Military full metal jackets are designed to tumble upon impact, and you never know just how they're going to do it. All right, let's review what we've learned and apply it. We've seen that power is not necessary for penetration. Power does not guarantee penetration. Velocity can hinder penetration. To get penetration, it's the design of the bullet that counts. Thanks to Sabos, even the caliber of our cartridge does not prevent a smaller caliber bullet from being used. Even then, small caliber bullets do not necessarily offer less penetration than larger calibers.

[00:09:14]And bullets of many types can behave unpredictably. So there is nothing in the velocity, power, or caliber of a 300 6 that is inconsistent with a bullet or bullet fragments remaining in the body of a murder victim. As we saw with the 21 Sharp, a lower power, lower velocity, smaller caliber rifle can go straight through any man given a properly designed solid bullet. But as we saw with the 300 Weatherbe, a very powerful 30 caliber ultra high velocity round, which is much faster and more powerful than a 300 6, penetrates very little tissue when a lightly constructed expanding bullet is used. And as we just saw, deflection within a target is always a real possibility. In other words, if we don't know the bullet design and impact velocity, the cartridge or gun it's fired from tell us almost nothing about how it will perform on a target. Whether a 300 6 wounds a coyote or is lethal to an elephant depends entirely on what sort of bullet is used. The 300 6 has the largest variety of bullets and loads of any gun in the world. Most reloading manuals include everything from 110 grain varmint loads up to 200, 220, or even 240 grain bullets. The full power rounds now blow away the old World War II military loads, but reduced loads are published with no more power than a 10 mm handgun. That brings us to our eighth and final point that the theoretical power of a cartridge is no guarantee of the practical power of any load for it.

[00:10:47]Even if you are convinced that full power 306 ammunition is bound to penetrate far more tissue than it actually does, there are many low power loads that reduce it to a shadow of its normal self. With the 300 6, the sky is the limit, and you can really make it do whatever you want. As we saw, Remington even gave us 55 grain 22 caliber loads for it. All of these different bullets and loads can be shot through the same rifles with massive differences on target. A reasonably lightweight, lightly constructed bullet, probably 150 grains or less, easily explains the tragedy in Utah. What alternative explanations fail to account for is how an underpowered cartridge could inflict such a devastating wound. Ultimately, the high velocity and power of a 300 6 actually help explain why the bullet fragmented so thoroughly. The fact that the ATF recovered 30 caliber bullet fragments also makes the 300 6 look like the simple explanation. The major problem with this entire subject and others like it is there is no consistent alternative theory. I've heard people suggest every round in the books as the real murder weapon from 17 caliber rimfires to 22250s and even palm pistols and laser beams. It's easy to question any narrative, but if we can't come up with consistent alternative answers, how can we justify our skepticism? Many people won't like to hear that. But what if I'd presented the material differently? What if I said there was a cover up and a 300 6 wasn't used in Utah, but a 300 Weatherbe or an even larger Magnum was? I could point to the footage. I've already shown you that if you want them to, guns far more powerful than a 300 6 will penetrate less than 9 mm. 45s, 21s, or look here, 380s. If the past 7 months tell us anything, it's that this would be music to the ears of many who now claim that this is all about how impossible it is for a big gun like a 306 to have killed Charlie.

[00:12:52]Because this isn't about ballistics.

[00:12:54]This is about a refusal to accept any official narrative and a willingness to believe any imaginative alternative. No matter what um local authorities or the FBI recovered, millions of people would have questioned it. Not because of what the gun is or isn't, but because of how they feel about the FBI and the justice system. No anomaly in the Kirk assassination is needed to explain this.

[00:13:19]The same people have done this before and they'll do it again. But there's a trial on right now, and I, for one, would like to see the man who did this receive justice. I hope the jury can see things clearly. I only wish all of our fellow citizens