On 10 September 2025, in Orem, Utah, right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Investigators later reported that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, had etched obscure internet memes onto bullet casings recovered with the weapon. Two weeks later, in Dallas, a gunman opened fire from a rooftop at a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, killing one detainee and injuring two others before taking his own life. In the aftermath, FBI Director Kash Patel shared images online of five unfired 8mm bullets, one of which bore the inscription “Anti-ICE.”
These cases are notable because they represent an emerging practice in which perpetrators inscribe meaning directly onto their weapons. Through such markings on stocks, barrels, magazines, and cartridges, attackers compress grievances, signal affiliations, or honour imagined lineages. The firearm itself becomes a communicative vessel, a symbolic artefact that scripts the event before the first shot and circulates long after it.
This Insight examines the growing use of inscribed and decorated firearms in politically motivated violence and argues that such markings should be treated as deliberate communicative acts. Through cases ranging from Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant to more recent incidents in Buffalo, Izhevsk, and Nashville, it shows how violent extremists are transforming weapons into visual texts that script identity, encode grievance, and perform imagined belonging.
This analysis situates inscriptions within extremist discourse, examines firearms as political artefacts, traces diffusion across movements, and considers how convergence and 3D printing expand personalisation. For practitioners, these dynamics underscore the importance of reading marked weapons not just as tools of violence, but as communicative artefacts that signal intent, allegiance, and future threat trajectories.
Weapons as Text and Symbol
The first widely recognised case of an ideologically motivated extremist deliberately adopting this practice was Anders Behring Breivik during the 2011 Oslo and Utøya attacks. Breivik engraved “Gungnir,” the spear of Odin, on his Ruger Mini-14 rifle and “Mjolnir,” the hammer of Thor, on his Glock 34 pistol. These Norse weapons symbolised precision and destructive power, framing his violence as mythic. Yet the inscriptions attracted relatively little attention at the time, overshadowed by the scale of his attack and his 1,500-page manifesto.
Nikolas Cruz, who carried out the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, also marked his weapons, crudely engraving swastikas onto rifle magazines and on one of his boots. Despite Breivik and Cruz both being elevated in extremist subcultures, it was the March 2019 attack by Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand, that brought weapon inscriptions into global focus.
Tarrant live-streamed his assault on two mosques, killing fifty-one worshippers and wounding dozens more, and the footage quickly went viral, making his weaponised iconography visible in real time. Media outlets worldwide devoted extensive coverage to decoding the inscriptions on his arsenal, which included references to historic battles with Muslim forces, the names of earlier attackers such as Alexandre Bissonnette, and white supremacist symbols like the Sonnenrad. Tarrant’s weapons served as encyclopedias of grievance and belonging, communicating simultaneously to online extremist audiences, mainstream media, and future attackers. His case marked the moment when inscriptions became a recognisable extremist tactic and trait.
Since Christchurch, at least eight further cases have involved decorated or inscribed firearms. Some were explicitly aligned with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE). Payton Gendron, who killed ten Black shoppers in Buffalo in 2022, inscribed racist slogans and extremist symbols on his rifle. Ryan Christopher Palmeter, who murdered three Black victims in Jacksonville in 2023, covered his AR-15 with swastikas and racist phrases. Artem Kazantsev, who attacked a school in Izhevsk, Russia, in 2022, attached key chains labelled “Columbine,” “Eric,” and “Dylan” to his pistols and painted “Hate” on his magazines, merging Columbine fandom with violent symbolism.
Aside from distinctive REMVE actors, the decoration of firearms has also been employed by perpetrators whom some analysts describe as Nihilistic Violent Extremists, motivated less by coherent doctrine than by hatred of society and a desire to see it destroyed. Solomon Henderson, who killed a student in Nashville in 2025, scrawled crude “soyjak” imagery and references on firearm parts. Robin Westman’s August 2025 attack on Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, where two children were killed and more than twenty were injured, was preceded by a video showing weapons covered in slogans including political threats, anti-religious taunts, antisemitic and anti-Catholic phrases, and references to earlier attackers. While these inscriptions may not articulate a coherent platform, they still operate as signals aimed at signalling belonging within an online community of violence.
Ultimately, some cases remain challenging to classify, particularly as court proceedings unfold. Luigi Mangione, accused of assassinating a health insurance executive in New York in December 2024, allegedly marked shell casing with the words “deny, defend, depose.” Although terrorism charges were dismissed, these markings function almost like a condensed manifesto, presenting a direct political claim through the weapon itself. In this sense, Mangione illustrates how a communicative practice that originated in extremist subcultures has begun to escape those confines.
Iconography as Discourse
Much like memes, inscriptions operate as discourse. Symbols, numbers, slogans, and stylistic cues are not merely decoration, but statements aimed at audiences. They can hail insiders, taunt targets, recruit sympathisers, or shape media narratives. The same inscription often carries multiple layers of meaning. Robinson, for example, allegedly etched “O bella, ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao” onto a bullet casing, a reference to the Italian resistance song recently revived in Money Heist and Far Cry 6. Its inclusion provoked debate over whether it was antifascist signalling, cultural borrowing, or meme-driven provocation.
Despite the difficulties in interpreting these inscriptions, the practice amounts to a visual and textual grammar. The lexicon includes recurring elements such as numbers, runes, slogans, memes, and brand logos. For example, a date or battle name may simultaneously denote a historical event, evoke a civilizational conflict, and index an online subculture that circulates those references. The syntax lies in how these items are clustered together into arguments. Because the discourse is intertextual, it borrows from past attackers, online forums, music, and games, signalling both lineage and audience. Its effectiveness does not depend on universal comprehension. Instead, it thrives on ambiguity, offering one reading to insiders and another to the broader public. In this way, inscriptions function simultaneously as speech and as threat.
This interpretive approach builds on what Robert Bunker and colleagues describe as “domestic violent extremist symbology-text narratives.” Their work highlights how the inscriptions and markings left on weapons can encode motive cues, reveal imagined audiences, and provide insight into the symbolic repertoires that attackers draw from. Understanding iconography in this way requires treating violent extremists as rational actors whose decision to devote time to decorating their firearms follows an internal logic. The act of inscription is not random but a communicative strategy, akin to the production of propaganda, manifestos, or online posts. Yet unlike manifestos, which aim to persuade or justify, inscriptions more often serve as tokens of belonging and continuity within extremist subcultures. They create a repertoire of signs that attackers draw on to signal community membership and embed themselves in a lineage of violence.
In this sense, inscriptions are perhaps best read not as manifestos in miniature but as micro-statements. Just as scholars have analysed extremist texts, memes, and online posts for the way they condense and circulate meaning, firearm inscriptions can be interpreted as short but dense communicative acts. In many cases, their purpose is not clarity but provocation, with perpetrators deliberately incorporating trolling references or even false flag slogans to confuse interpretation, taunt investigators, or signal in-group irony.
Firearms as Political Artefacts
From this perspective, firearms must be understood not only as tools of violence but as political artefacts that script behaviour, carry meaning, and anchor extremist discourse. As Zagara and Kriner observe, in militant accelerationist propaganda, firearms are staged as props of terror, often placed in the hands of canonised “saints.”
Just as terrorist groups have developed normative preferences for particular attack modes or weapons, contemporary extremists deliberately infuse their firearms with ideological significance. These choices reveal that weapons are selected not only for tactical utility but also for their ability to project identity, legitimacy, and myth. Understanding firearms in this way highlights a broader “armament culture” in which design, inscription, or production methods communicate political meaning.
Diffusion of the Practices
Once Tarrant’s weapons were displayed and replayed online, inscriptions on firearms gained global notoriety and became a legible template that required little skill or resources to copy. Adopting inscription styles such as Tarrant’s white lettering, as done by Gendron, Palmeter, Henderson, and Westman, was arguably not only an act of homage but also a declaration of belonging to an imagined extremist lineage. This aesthetic coherence allowed otherwise “lone” attackers to situate themselves within a symbolic community.
Diffusion has occurred along three main channels. Within extremist communities, images are archived, valorised, and recirculated as models to emulate. In mainstream media, journalists decode inscriptions, inadvertently amplifying their reach. And in the justice process, official evidence photos are released or leaked, offering further circulation. As these images spread, new perpetrators borrow the form, altering it with local grievances, memes, or subcultural references.
Importantly, diffusion is not confined to one ideology. It crosses borders and scenes. For instance, in the aftermath of Christchurch, some pro-ISIS accounts shared digitally manipulated images of rifles overlaid with extremist Islamic references. Research has shown how both IS and REMVE often mimic each other’s aesthetics and practices.
Convergence and Emerging Technologies
The practice can also be understood as a form of technological convergence, where a simple nail, an engraving tool, or, more commonly, a white paint pen intersects with a firearm to create a single communicative artefact. In this form, the weapon becomes more than the sum of its parts: both an implement of violence and a medium of symbolic performance. This perspective highlights a major shortcoming in how we think about extremist use of technology. Too often, (as explained in my presentation at the Fifth Annual GNET Conference) threats are assessed in silos, without recognising that the real danger lies in their convergence. The markings on a rifle may appear rudimentary, but they belong to the same spectrum of convergence that links firearms with cameras and social media platforms to create new terrorist techniques, tactics, and procedures. Convergence is not confined to advanced technologies like AI or drones; it begins at the most basic level, where pairing simple tools with firearms generates new communicative possibilities. What looks insignificant in isolation may, in fact, represent the early stages of the same process through which extremists develop more disruptive and unforeseen capabilities.
Seen in this light, even the crude convergence of paint pens and rifles may foreshadow broader trends. What appears rudimentary at present could be an early indication of how extremists will embrace technologies that make aesthetic modification more accessible and more dynamic. 3D printing, in particular, lowers the barrier for this kind of experimentation, offering opportunities for customisation and symbolic inscription. In this sense, firearm inscriptions may not simply be a marginal practice but a precursor to the wider acceptance of 3D-printed firearms within extremist milieus, where the ability to fuse function with personalised symbolism becomes a defining feature of adoption. Recent research on REMVE actors’ use of 3D-printed firearms has identified symbolic resonance as one of the four key drivers of adoption, since they allow for personalisation and embed ideological messages directly into their design. While no terrorist attack has yet been carried out with a 3D-printed firearm customised with iconography, several REMVE actors have been apprehended with 3D-printed firearms in which extremist symbols were incorporated directly into the design.
Conclusion
Inscriptions on firearms and ammunition function as shorthand signals that create a sense of continuity, belonging, and recognition across extremist milieus. The growing diffusion of this practice across ideological boundaries indicates that the weapon itself has become a communicative artefact in contemporary political violence.
For practitioners, the key is not to over-interpret these markings as singular statements of belief, but to treat them as part of a broader repertoire of performance, community-building, and provocation that increasingly shapes how extremist violence is staged, understood, and copied. At the same time, it is important to recognise how emerging technologies such as modular components and 3D printing, will continue to expand the opportunities for personalisation and symbolic inscription, ensuring that this practice will likely become more common and more visible in the future.
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Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, terrorism, and the evolution of terrorist tactics. He is also the Scientific Director of Pier Point Consulting, a firm specializing in providing analysis and threat assessment related to the misuse of emerging technology.
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