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Looks like a suppressed semi-auto pistol. my guess would be a home-made suppressor, which is why he's having to rack the slide between shots. Suppressors mount to the barrel, and the added weight throws off the physics of the most common forms of delayed-blowback actions, turning your semi-auto into a manually-operated single shot. Factory versions usually have a free-float mechanism that decouples the suppressor long enough for the weapon to cycle, but a homemade device is almost certainly not going to have one of those. The shooter seems to be pretty clearly practiced with this particular weapon; I see two clean operations with no hint of surprise at the failure to cycle and then what looks like a failure to enter battery that he efficiently taps the slide to clear for the third shot.
Concur on this clearly being an assassination.
[EDIT] - Video is now down.
Looks specifically like a pistol with an integrated suppressor and manual action, in the vein of the B&T Station 6, and 9mm casings were recovered at the scene.
Video demonstration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8XHxUlg0F8
The shooter in the video manipulates the back of the barrel (rather than racking a slide) after each shot and makes the same sort of jerking motion required to eject spent cartridges from the Station 6. He also does indeed appear to clear a misfire, but not a serious one as he was able to eject the cartridge and chamber and fire another.
I don't know about a paid hit. When was the last time an American exec was killed like this? I asked Grok for examples from the last 40 years, it pulled only the 2001 murder of Federal Prosecutor Thomas Wales. Other than it being suspected as a paid hit, I don't see these as exactly analogous, and on that note, today, isn't every online-classified-tor-bitcoin-assassin a fed? Who has the means to find a guy like the shooter but lacks the means to, say, cover their wife's cancer treatment? Major league corporate shadowiness also doesn't feel right, again I'd wonder where are the other examples, and I'd think at that level they just have the guy killed on his yacht and that sends whatever message they want.
Revenge seems simplest. Tech, energy, banking, all those could have myriad motives. Health insurance CEO, revenge crushes everything else on probability. So ex-SF guy loses his wife to cancer after she was denied coverage, decides to kill the CEO of their insurance company. As ex-SF he would have the skill, and to have made it through SF selection for whichever branch, he'd have outlier motivation and resolve. Everything necessary to coldly decide to kill another man, and then kill that man in such a manner as we see in the video. And probably get away with it.
Screwing a home-made suppressor onto the average semi-auto handgun turns it into a manual action. Most handguns use a delayed-blowback system where the delay is provided by tilting the barrel to disengage some form of locking lug. Adding an extra pound or so of weight to the front of the barrel throws this system off, causing the gun to fail to cycle properly, which means you need to cycle it by hand. But don't take my word for it, here's Gun Jesus making the same point. The video alone should be sufficient, though, since on the first shot you can clearly see the slide moving and the large puff of gas exiting the ejection port as the gun partially cycles. Manual actions like the B&T do not do this.
Factory suppressors generally incorporate a Nielsen device, a small spring-loaded device that bypasses this issue, allowing suppressed semi-auto fire. Dedicated suppressed pistols sometimes use a slide lock to disable the semi-auto function completely. But what we see in the video is highly consistent with a semi-auto pistol mounting a simple, home-made suppressor that is compromising its semi-auto function.
My bet is that this is left-wing terrorism by a competent, motivated individual. No particular bet on a military or law-enforcement background; nothing here screams super-special operator to me.
The only definitive point I see in the video is the visible gas on first discharge. The Station 6 demonstration video shows it releasing gas only when the bolt is cycled, but that video is in daylight and what appears to be warm weather. There is a moment where it's possible he was racking the slide, but there aren't enough pixels to say that definitively, same with when he first fires and it's possible the slide was moving back, or it was just recoil. In the typical circumstance I would trust Ian's assessment, here I don't know what he sees in that blur to call speculation about it being a Welrod-type "conclusively wrong." He just says he watched the surveillance video, and maybe he's seen the actual source video, that would still leave an explanation needed for why the NYPD thinks it's a Station 6.
Leftist terrorism seems very unlikely. Why an insurance exec and not oil? Why either of those and not a politician? If he had the patience to learn a gun, make a suppressor, go in with a plan, not freak out — why not do all that with a rifle against a comparatively hardened target? Or why not use a bomb like the Red Army Faction and Alfred Herrhausen? There's no objective, no real victory, and that applies to revenge, but the widower motivated by the death of his wife gives us something specific, the leftist looking for someone who "needs killing," why would he ever start with insurance? The target and method say vendetta, not politics.
re: the gun, your train of thought seems reasonable, but goddamn do I hate the media.
I can believe that a police officer said this to a journalist at some point. I have no reason to consider this as having any weight until they explain exactly why "police" think that. Unique extractor markings on the cases left at the scene? Witness testimony? I do not believe that "police" generally know more about guns than I do. Many of them know considerably less, and the journalists passing the message know nothing at all.
I call bullshit, completely off the cuff. I do not believe the B&T Station Six is "known in Great Britian as a Welrod pistol". I do not believe that there are enough Station Sixes in Great Britian to be "known" as anything. I am confident that what is "known in Great Britain as a Welrod" is the Welrod, which was developed there in WWII. The S6 is a modernized version of the concept built in Switzerland.
This statement is a perfect example of why you should never, ever listen to journalists about anything to do with firearms, or indeed on any technical matter, or indeed in any way at all. But at least it's not a lie, RITE GIYZ!? The S6 does have a silencer. Moreover, a barrel long enough to act as a silencer for 9mm parabellum would be... impractically long. At a guess, a couple dozen yards long at least, and that's a very conservative guess.
C-c-combo breaker! This is the only sentence in this paragraph that is not egregiously wrong.
As for the rest of your post:
For the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people are publicly celebrating the murder right now. Health Care costs are peak culture war.
Because this is easier and far more survivable. The part where he does this and gets away with it makes it incredibly effective from a propaganda perspective.
To put it a bit reductively, bombs are much harder on a whole variety of axes. This was very, very, very easy to do, and required resources that are a rounding error even to someone working minimum wage.
The last several years are best understood as a massive, distributed search for the best way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. This is a search result popping into the hopper. That's the objective and the victory, when you get down to it.
Then why are people who have no possible connection to this vendetta openly celebrating its execution?
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When you say "homemade", do you mean the general case of "didn't buy it from a licensed FFL"?
The paranoid part of me assumes this is going to be one of those "totally a solvent trap" models that you can buy on AliExpress.
yeah, that general sort of thing would be my guess, but it could just as easily be a scratch-built baffle stack or a tube packed with steel wool or a 3d-printed plastic toob. The actual muffling components of suppressors are not complicated. The dingus that makes them compatible with a tilting-block semi-auto pistol action is much more so.
Love learning new technical jargon!
(Just kidding, this really is a fascinating conversation to someone with only a bit of gun knowledge)
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I added a new link but it might get taken down in the near future too.
Download, share and backup.
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