On Friday, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah native, was identified by federal law enforcement as a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk. During Friday’s press conference, officials said that several bullet casings recovered from a hunting rifle found near the crime scene had messages inscribed on them.
During the press conference, officials appeared to take the inscriptions literally, to the extent they ascribed meaning to them at all. But the four messages apparently written by the alleged shooter instead seem to invoke a variety of memes and video game references.
One of the casings was said to be engraved with the phrase “Hey Fascist! Catch!” followed by an up arrow, a right arrow, and three downward-facing arrows. That sequence is an apparent reference to the “Eagle 500kg bomb” in the popular third-person-shooter game Helldivers 2. The bomb has become a meme in the Helldivers community for being comically excessive.
Arrowhead Game Studios, the developers of Helldivers 2, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Launched in 2024, the game has grown a cult following for its Starship Troopers–like storyline. The cooperative shooter allows teams of up to four players, called “Helldivers,” to spread “freedom” across a fictional universe—fighting bugs, robots, and squid-like aliens rather than other humans. Their form of managed democracy is “basically fascism,” says independent extremism researcher Harry Batchelor, who works with the Extremism and Gaming Research Network.
Helldivers 2 is satire, and the vast majority of players are in on it. The game, says Batchelor, “takes “the whole ‘pretending to be democracy while actually being a fascist government’ so seriously, it’s obviously a joke.” The community around the game has generally maintained a positive reputation, even working together to combat “review bombing”—coordinated negative reviews intended to hurt a game’s chance of success.
The arrows that activate the Eagle 500kg bomb have been used in other memes to show that a user is “going to do a big, violent action,” Don Caldwell, editor in chief of Know Your Meme, tells WIRED. “That’s maybe a cheeky way of expressing it on the casing.”
Shortly after the Friday press conference about Kirk’s fatal shooting, moderators locked the r/Helldivers subreddit. “Due to recent events and the high amount of posts about the topic, we will be locking the subreddit temporarily,” a post on the subreddit reads. “We’re aware of what happened, our modteam doesn’t condone it.”
Helldivers may not be the only game reference on the casings. Another casing was allegedly engraved with lyrics to a famous Italian folk song called “Bella Ciao,” which translates directly to “goodbye beautiful.” The song, which has associations with postwar anti-fascist movements in Italy, has seen a resurgence on social media in recent years. Notably, “Bella Ciao” holds significance for rebel forces during a mission in Far Cry 6, a video game set on a fictional Caribbean island ruled by a dictator. A USB stick with the song is a collectible item labeled “Bella Ciao de Libertad,” a reference to the rebel group; the in-game description notes that the song has been “inspiring guerrillas and partisans for over a century.”
Another alleged engraving on the casings was the quote “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this,” an apparent reference to a furry-related meme that was popularized in 2015. (“OwO” is an emoticon representing a form of cute surprise.)
One of the other alleged memes on the casings says, “If you read this you are gay LMAO,” which seems to be more of a common online insult than a specific reference. “I believe this person is genuinely just always online,” Batchelor says.
“They knew that they’d be discovered and posted about,” says Caldwell of the decision to include meme references on the casings. “People understand that memes are very powerful and get a lot of attention. As soon as people read them, they’re going to desperately try to figure out what the reference means. It makes it more interesting.”
There has also been renewed focus on video games and violence recently. On September 9, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed to games as a possible contributor to school shootings.
But in the aftermath of this shooting and others like it, Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies extremism, says any critiques of gaming culture in this instance must be contextualized. “It’s not a specific game, but it’s rather the use of gaming references. It’s not the specific meme, but rather the use of online memes,” he says. “It’s not the specific ways that things are written on the gun, but that they’re writing something on the gun at all.”
It’s important to not read too deeply into any face-value political meaning of the messages on the bullet casings, Newhouse says. “It’s pretty indicative of general speech associated with the deep parts of internet culture, in particular the types that are very much into irony posting and edgelord humor.”
