Ballistic Gel Head Shot — High-Speed Test Clip
What This Video Is
A 26-second silent ballistics demonstration, filmed outdoors, showing a rifle round striking a clear ballistic-gelatin bust moulded as a head, neck and shoulders with an anatomical skull set inside it. There is no narration, no music and no on-screen text — the clip is pure demonstration footage.
It reached this archive through X post 2026310419405504514, posted by the
account Darth Powell. The post's own headline text asserts, in blunt and
profane terms, that anyone who believes Charlie Kirk was shot with a .30-06
round is mistaken. That framing is the poster's argument; the footage itself
is generic terminal-ballistics testing and contains nothing specific to Utah
Valley University or to September 10, 2025.
The same clip is held twice in this archive: once as a copy pulled straight from X (this page) and once as a copy filed by hand under the ballistics folder of the capture mirror. Both are catalogued because they were ingested by different routes and carry different content hashes, but they are the same 26 seconds of footage. The second copy is on the page Darth Powell — .30-06 gel test.
There is no speech in the clip. The audio track carries only the muzzle report, the impact, and — in the slow-motion half — a pitched-down rumble of the same sounds. A transcription pass over the file returned a single stray syllable and nothing else, which is consistent with a video that has no dialogue at all.
What The Footage Shows
Two shots, both static camera, in sequence.
- 0:00 - 0:05 — Medium shot. The gel bust sits on a white folding table in an open field bordered by leafless deciduous trees and dry grass, under heavy overcast light. At about 0:01 a round strikes the front of the bust. Gel ruptures out of the back of the neck and the head buckles forward onto the table.
- 0:05 - 0:26 — Extreme slow motion, close-up, side profile of the same bust. The round enters at the throat. A large temporary cavity opens along the track, then collapses; gel fragments, water and gas blast out the rear of the neck while the head tilts slowly downward.
No people appear on camera. The only objects in frame are the bust, the table and a plastic water jug in the background of the second shot.
What the footage establishes and what the post claims are not the same thing. The clip demonstrates one general proposition: a high-energy rifle round through a neck-sized gel block produces a violent through-and-through with a large temporary cavity and material ejected out the back. It does not identify the calibre used in the test, does not state the range, and does not compare its result against any wound described in the Kirk case. Whether the demonstration is a fair analogue for the neck injury at UVU is exactly the question under dispute, and the video does not settle it. Read it as a visual premise offered in support of an argument, not as evidence about the event.
How It Connects
The argument the clip is deployed in support of runs through several parts of this investigation.
- Gun and Bullet Analysis — the section that collects the competing accounts of what struck Charlie Kirk.
- Mauser .30-06 Rifle — Official Narrative — the weapon and calibre the State's account rests on, which is what the poster is disputing.
- .30-06 Energy Mismatch — the energy-and-cavitation argument this footage is used to illustrate.
- Wound Trajectory and Angle — where the entry, exit and path questions are laid out.
- ATF Fragment — Inconclusive Match — the laboratory result researchers cite when questioning the calibre.
- Ballistics and Wound Analysis — the medical-side treatment of the same dispute.
- Tyler Robinson — the defendant charged in the case; the clip is filed against his page because the calibre question bears directly on the State's account.