by WorldTribune Staff, October 8, 2025 Real World News
Both conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were killed by the same type of bullet, a .30-06. In both cases, the bullet did not exit the body, reports say.
A 2019 article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery details attempts by doctors to save King’s life.
King was shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis on April 4, 1968
According to the report, King’s autopsy showed that the bullet had entered through his right mandible (jawbone), shattering it. It then traveled through the right side of his neck and the area just above his clavicle (collarbone).
It damaged several veins and arteries, including the jugular vein, before transecting his spinal cord and lodging near his left scapula (shoulder blade), the report said.
The bullet hit the right side of King’s face and neck and he “began bleeding profusely from the neck wound,” the report said
Andrew Young was the first to reach King and initially thought he was dead. But he felt a pulse. King seemed to move his mouth, but no words were heard and he quickly lost consciousness.
King was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis, which was less than two miles away. Doctors worked to save his life, but the injuries were too severe. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m.
Doctors later said if King had survived the shooting, he would have been left a quadriplegic, with paralysis or serious weakness in both legs and both arms.
James Earl Ray was later arrested and pleaded guilty in the murder of King. He was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville.
Investigators had discovered that Ray had fired the shot from the second-floor bathroom window of the rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel, and that the bullet had hit King from the front, at a slight downward trajectory.
The weapon was a Remington Gamemaster slide action rifle with a mounted scope. The round was a soft-point, metal-jacketed .30-06 made by Remington-Peters — a powerful round used by the military and in big-game hunting.
The shot was fired from a distance of 207 feet, investigators said.
“Kirk was also shot from the front, but from more than twice the distance as King — about 426 feet (142 yards),” Margaret Menge noted in an Oct. 7 Substack.com report.
The bullet was the same — a .30-06 — and it entered Kirk’s neck in the front on his left side (King was hit on his right).
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a post on X that the bullet was found inside Kirk’s body, just beneath his skin, and that the surgeon who’d worked on him at the hospital in Orem, Utah, had said that is was “an absolute miracle” that the bullet didn’t go all the way through and hit one of the people behind him and that his bone density was so impressive that he was “like the man of steel.”
“This statement has been widely ridiculed,” Menge noted. “But given the example of the MLK assassination with the exact same round, and given recent analysis by people like Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity and former sniper trainer Matt Tardio, it’s looking more likely to be true (maybe minus the ‘man of steel’ and super bone density information).”
Tardio pointed out in a recent interview with Mario Nawfal that the velocity of the bullet that killed Kirk is not know and that several factors could have led to it traveling at a slower speed, including the engraving on the cartridge, which could have weakened the casing, and also low-grade ammunition, of which a great deal was produced during the Covid pandemic. Tardio also pointed out that a recent YouTube demonstrations of what a .30-06 does to a human body using gel models are not accurate because bullets move much faster through the gel than they do through a human body.
Tardio also described the difficulty in predicting what a bullet will do once it enters a human body, saying he knows of someone who was shot in the arm with an AK-47 from about 20 meters (65 feet) away. The bullet hit the man in the arm and then “rode up the bone before it worked its way around into the back side of him” where it finally stopped.
Alex Jones of Infowars said on his show that he’d spoken with Kolvet on the phone, after the X post cited above, and that Kolvet had told him that what he’d written in the post was a simplification, and that the bullet actually, according to the surgeon, hit Charlie’s spine and bounced down, blowing out six vertebrae, shattered and exploded into the heart, with fragments flying back up. He said what was found under the skin near the shoulder was not the whole bullet, but fragments of the bullet.
Report: Same kind of bullet killed Charlie Kirk, Martin Luther King, Jr. added by Editor Two on
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