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In the frantic hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, investigators discovered a gun in a wooded area near the scene in northern Utah. The federal agents seeking to trace the weapon faced a daunting task.
It was a decades-old, German-made rifle built for use by the military in both World Wars, according to multiple law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation. So old that it may have been brought into the U.S. before laws were enacted in the 1960s requiring guns to be affixed with serial numbers or other marks to enable tracing.
There are believed to be millions of such weapons in homes across America.
Fortunately for investigators, the alleged shooter was identified through other means — his family — who convinced him to surrender to police. But the alleged use of such a vintage weapon has raised fears among some former federal agents of the potential for other would-be assassins to seek out these powerful, accurate and hard-to-trace firearms.
“Short of the security afforded to the president, there’s no way to defend against the threat posed by this,” said Scott Sweetow, a retired official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The suspect, Tyler Robinson, surrendered to authorities one day after Kirk was killed at an event on the Utah Valley University campus. According to alleged text messages shared by prosecutors in charging documents, Robinson told his roommate and romantic partner, who is transgender, that he killed Kirk because he “had enough of his hatred.”
Robinson, 22, who has been charged with aggravated murder and six other counts, had recently become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to prosecutors.
A public memorial service for Kirk, the hugely popular but also polarizing founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, will be held Sunday in Arizona.
Prosecutors identified the recovered gun as a Mauser model 98. The .30-06 caliber rifle, which fires cartridges slightly smaller than 8 millimeters, had belonged to Robinson’s grandfather, prosecutors said.
The authorities have not revealed how they believe Robinson’s grandfather obtained the gun or whether they were able to successfully trace it. An ATF spokesman declined to comment to NBC News.
The gun is a bolt-action rifle, which requires users to manually reload between shots. A person must pull the bolt to the rear and then move it forward in order to move a new round into place and fire again.
Following the wars in Europe, countless American GIs returned home with German-made Mausers. In subsequent years, Mauser rifles and other similar versions could be obtained simply by ordering them through the mail.
For decades, they have been favored by hunters who prize them for their durability, reliability and accuracy. With .30-06 rounds, they are ideal weapons to take down medium to large game like deer, elk and even bear.
But it is exceedingly rare for them to be used in crimes, according to former ATF gun agents and federal reports. Most gun violence in America is carried out with pistols, and semiautomatic AR-15-style rifles have been used to commit some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.
“A bolt-action rifle? You don’t see those guns used in violent crimes,” said Tim Sloan, a former ATF agent who retired as the head of its Mexico branch.
That’s because they can’t be as easily concealed as handguns and they’re not designed to spray a large volume of bullets at once, experts say.
But they are, in some ways, ideally suited for use in sniper-style killings. Because they are so ubiquitous and beloved by hunters and recreational shooters, a person toting such a rifle in a place like Utah would not arouse any suspicion.
And they are so well made that, with a decent scope, a person with basic firearm proficiency can strike a target from 150 to 200 yards away, roughly the distance of the shot fired by the Kirk assassin.
“You do not have to have gone to sniper school or have been any type of champion marksmen,” said Brian Greco, a retired NYPD officer who served in the counterterrorism unit and a Marine Corps veteran.
Despite their age, vintage Mauser rifles like the one authorities say was used to kill Kirk are widely available at firearm stores, pawn shops and gun shows, experts said. They can also be modified to accommodate different rounds, scopes and lighter stocks made of fiberglass.
“The basic, plain-Jane Mausers — you can go to any gun show in America and see these things for a few hundred dollars,” said Sweetow, the retired ATF official. “The heavily customized versions can go for thousands.”
The use of a decades-old, European military surplus rifle to kill Kirk echoes one of America’s most infamous crimes: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, used a Carcano model 38, a bolt-action rifle originally designed in the late 19th century for the Italian military. He obtained it by mail order through an advertisement in a gun magazine.
The killing helped to usher in the Gun Control Act of 1968, which among other things required firearms to be sold by federally licensed dealers, to have markings to enable tracing, and for paperwork to be filled out identifying the buyer.
Gun control advocates have long been pushing for more restrictions, such as a ban on semiautomatic, military-style firearms like AR-15s. But they acknowledge that such a ban would not cover a bolt-action rifle like the Mauser 98.
“It’s a hunting rifle, and people hunt legitimately,” said Greg Lickenbrock — author of the book “Safe Gun Ownership for Dummies” and a senior firearms analyst for Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group founded by Mike Bloomberg.
He said the use of this kind of gun in a violent crime highlights the gaps in law enforcement’s ability to track down the owners.
“This is a very obvious example of the tracing system having huge holes in it,” Lickenbrock added.
That view is shared even by some who believe strongly in the Second Amendment.
“I am definitely not a ‘more government’ type of person, but as someone who takes firearms safety seriously and has worked with firearms for 30 years through the Marine Corps, NYPD and now as an armed guard for a Long Island school district, I do feel there has to be accountability to these older and unserialized firearms,” Greco said.
“A vintage firearm in grandpa’s old trunk is cool,” he added, “but it also unfortunately gives access to a firearm to someone who may otherwise have not had access or could have been denied access.”
Rich Schapiro is a reporter with the NBC News national security unit.
Andrew Blankstein is an investigative reporter for NBC News. He covers the Western U.S., specializing in crime, courts and homeland security.
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