He hit his chest and the bullet splintered. I doubt the killer was planning much symbolism. Perhaps Satan was and got lucky. Hitting a rectangle of 30 sq inches from 200 yards isn’t that difficult and is only difficult if you have no familiarity with guns, are recoil shy and have no knowledge of ballistics and how things work.
There’s an interesting bit of history associated with whatever was used to shoot at Charlie. Assuming, for discussion, that a 30-06 was actually used, some stuff comes to mind:
If I could see the base of the fired case I’d know about how old it is, who made it, and how the bullet was made. The punk shooter is not old enough to have easily acquired a ball round and anything off the shelf would be made “new school”.
Remington lead the pack in the past 3 decades in changing the way bullets (slugs) are made. Old school was to form the bullet jacket from back to front, forming the tip and then closing the base with a “gas check” piece. Bullets for high powered rounds are now made by drawing from the base then closing the tip which eliminates the need for the rear gas check piece.
These bullets, with the solid base, are much more durable and tend to stay in one piece after impact even tho they can still expand as they penetrate a target. Concurrently, the makers have learned how to make the brass cases even thinner which would make engraving on one kind of tricky.
It takes about 12” of ballistic Gelatin to get a 30 caliber round to start expanding. Sometimes I use a wooden log when I want to recover a round to check for performance. And the base of a modern slug will still be intact even if it hits a steel plate. Body armor and a human neck would not do much, if any, damage to a modern 06 slug.
Having said all that, one of the Utah officials mentioned that all the shot impact stuff has been recovered and sent to Quantico. That gives me a bit of confidence that a bullet base will be matchable to a fired case, and that, in turn, to the gun that fired it. A modern thin case would heckuva fire form to the chamber that fired it leaving no doubt where it came from. Test firing the allegedly recovered rifle would instantly verify/discount any connection.
Another bit of ammo history comes into play here. When Remington went to its new slug forming method the rounds had a tiny hole in the nose. This brought up the question during Gulf War I that these were Geneva illegal hollow points. That got settled with the addition of a small insert that closed the hole.
Then Gulf War II came along and our national arsenal couldn’t keep up for training. So they asked Remington to help. Not enough so they asked Winchester. Still not enough so they asked the Israelis. But the Israeli ammo had to be sent here for training only. I still have a couple of the boxes marked “not for combat” since it seems to have insulted the Muzzards to get shot with Jewish ammo.
Anyway, all of this has lead to how ammo is now made and how we will be able to finally tell who and wot shot Charlie.