Several people have accused our department of lying about an incident involving a target shooter unintentionally firing a 50-caliber bullet into the home of one of our firefighters.  We are accused of having an “anti-gun agenda,” because they claim the bullet’s case can be seen in this picture…

Those people apparently mistook an indentation in the fired bullet as the neck of the round’s case. Here is a picture of the fired bullet after it was removed from our firefighter’s interior wall…

// Added on 04/08/2018 — Those who claim the bullet should be more mushroomed are incorrect. That bullet was plenty hard enough to withstand tearing a few pine tree branches and puncturing one exterior and one interior wall after being slowed down from traveling a fair bit of distance. As for rifling marks, they are clearly seen in the photo taken after the bullet was extracted from the wall; they’re not as noticeable in the original photo, because the tapered top of the bullet that went through the walls is sticking out, not the widest part of the round that has the deeper rifling marks. //

We do NOT have any political agenda regarding “gun control.” We simply posted about the incident in the hope that doing so might prevent a future shooting-related accident.

The Flathead County Sheriff’s Department can confirm the incident took place. The person writing this response called the department and spoke to the deputy who actually responded to our firefighter’s 9-1-1 call and had a discussion with the target shooter. (Our firefighter decided not to press charges and simply have the target shooter pay for damages to the house.) The incident report number on record at the sheriff’s office is 2018-08241.

This shall be our last response on the matter; we have better things to do than debate angry or fearful skeptics who malign us or our intentions.