Writing on ammo is ancient, but the way shooters are doing it now offers a window into their motive

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN) — Scrawled messages on bullet casings and weapons left behind have popped up at several high-profile shootings over the past year. The seemingly unusual practice is actually reminiscent of a centuries-old tactic but can often provide insight to investigators.

From the fatal 2024 ambush of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson to the August attack on a Minneapolis Catholic school, plus deadly shootings this month of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and people at a Dallas immigration facility, each gunman inscribed messages on their ammunition and firearms depicting cultural and political ideologies.

Experts say while the micro-trend is alarming, in some instances it’s revealing for detectives parsing through crime scenes for a potential motive. And while performative in nature, suspected extremists want to ensure their point is made, controlling the narrative even if they aren’t alive to see it or are on the run from law enforcement.

Here’s a look at how the practice has evolved and what we can interpret from the messages left behind.

‘Psychological warfare’

Early warfare focused on hand-to-hand combat, but in time, the types of weapons advanced to include items like slings, crossbows and swords and with them came the practice of sending messages with their use.

Inscriptions on weapons and ammunition alike take on three categories: personalization for the owner, personalization for an opponent, and personalization for someone else to find, firearms historian Ashley Hlebinsky told CNN, and those messages can be a starting point for investigators.

The ancient Greeks and Romans would either chisel or write phrases and symbols on projectiles like arrows or cast their own for slingshots, Hlebinsky said, adding the practice dates back as early as 400 BCE.

People would mark their projectiles with symbols or words solely for identification purposes, she said, while others would use the markings to antagonize or bait their opponent.

As time went on, the messages evolved into sentiments of national pride.

During World War II, surviving artifacts and photos show messages written on bombs and missiles destined for Axis powers with words and phrases like “ouch” or “catch,” Hlebinsky, executive director of the University of Wyoming’s firearms Research Center, said.

Hlebinsky notes that ultimately, those projectiles would be destroyed upon impact, without the message ever being received.

The practice of political messages on ammunition isn’t limited to soldiers, military or individual extremists. Last year, Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, wrote “Finish Them!” on Israeli artillery shells during a Memorial Day visit to Israel, according to photos in a post from Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, who accompanied her on the trip.

“You see that idea of psychological warfare or taking a metaphorical, literal shot at your opponent, and in that circumstance, there is a chance that somebody might read it,” she said. “But as you kind of move on throughout history, that component of it kind of drops away when you get to the world of writing on the missile artillery shell projectile itself but almost comes back a little bit with kind of the contemporary things that we’re seeing with writing on a cartridge case.”

Now, in addition to poring over manifestos and digital footprints, investigators are using these messages found on ammunition and firearms as clues for intention, as illustrated in the Dallas ICE facility incident when investigators were piecing together a possible motive for the attack.

FBI Director Kash Patel shared a photo of crime scene evidence depicting a bullet casing with a message penned in blue ink on one of the rounds.

“While the investigation is ongoing, an initial review of the evidence shows an ideological motive behind this attack,” Patel wrote on X, referring to the casing.

Social media fuels notoriety

Before ammunition was personalized with messages, gun magazines and weapons themselves were often embellished with inscriptions.

The practice of sending political messages through bullet casings appears to be a more recent phenomenon, which Peter Rutland, a government professor at Wesleyan University, told CNN can be connected to the rise of the internet and social media.

The practice began in earnest with Anders Breivik, who in 2011, motivated by White supremacy, carried out a mass killing of over 70 people in Norway, Rutland said, adding Breivik inscribed slogans on his weapons and gave them names after Norse gods like Odin and Thor.

Breivik’s approach has since been directly referenced and copied by many subsequent mass shooters, Rutland said, pointing to the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, and in Buffalo, New York, at a grocery store in 2022 – both incidents where Breivik’s ideologies appeared in handwriting on the firearms used by the shooters.

It wasn’t until 2024 when three 9 mm shell casings from the crime scene of a gunned down health care CEO, turned up with the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” written across them – a nod to common terms used by health insurance companies when evaluating claims within their coverage, that Rutland said he started to see messages left behind on bullet casings.

More recently, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, investigators found a bullet casing inscribed with “Hey fascist! Catch!” – a message Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said “speaks for itself.” A swath of messages on several other bullet casings were also recovered and found to include an ode to memes that point to a devotion to internet culture and allusions to video games.

“These folks are kind of learning from each other,” Rutland said. “They’re watching through social media, on the dark web, what these other killers did, and they’re trying to emulate them and kind of advance the cause.”

A journey to be ‘significant’

Sometimes it’s not inherently obvious what someone’s motivation is, according to Karl Kaltenthaler, a political science professor at The University of Akron who is researching the radicalization process and recruitment into violent political extremism.

At times, “there’s a whole hodgepodge of grievances,” he said. “It’s like, ‘what’s really driving this?’ Don’t get hung up in the narrative, because that’s part of it, but it’s probably not the most important thing.”

But in the aftermath of tragedy, there’s often a need for victims and their families, alongside investigators, to understand why it occurred.

Messages left behind by assailants may offer, at times, the only window into their motive, but it’s important to be guided by facts, according to CNN Law Enforcement Analyst Charles Ramsey.

“You certainly have to follow down that path,” he explained. “But you can never, ever shut out other paths that are potentially there because you get tunnel vision, thinking that you’re homing in on one motive when it could be something different.”

Instead, Kaltenthaler said, it all boils down to significance, a person’s need to feel that they matter, “that people respect you, you have control over your life, as opposed to others controlling your life.”

The deeper the need for significance, the more extreme the behavior can be, Kaltenthaler said. The behavior may be fueled by those before them who have achieved what a would-be attacker deems a desirable amount of notoriety.

“There’s a very kind of disturbing online movement of fanboys for school shooting(s), where these guys very often openly talk about it as a good thing and copy it,” he said.

Both Rutland and Ramsey agree with that sentiment, adding that social media incentivizes people in spreading the word about their actions in a way that didn’t exist in the pre-internet era, coupled with the demand for more information quickly.

With recent high-profile homicides, the public is seeing imagery and hearing details from investigations that they typically wouldn’t, Ramsey said.

Ultimately, he said, an investigator may choose to release details, like the content of a manifesto or the phrases or words written on ammunition to trigger something in someone else that may lead to finding a potential suspect who may still be on the run.

“We’re in a bit of a powder keg right now in the US, in that you’ve got people on both sides who feel very victimized by the other side … For most people, that’s simply going to mean ‘I’m going to look at those people with disdain,’” Kaltenthaler said. “But for some people, that may be, ‘I’m going to be a hero to my community and go do something about those other people who are awful.’”

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