Veterinary pistol with ‘weird cultural’ significance may have killed insurance CEO: expert

Investigators are exploring the possibility that a pistol used by veterinarians to put down sick or wounded animals was also the assassin’s weapon used to gun down UnitedHealthcare’s CEO early Wednesday.

Aside from being “practically silent,” the B&T VP9 also carries with it cultural significance, according to John Miller, CNN’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.

“It’s a 9 mm round and it's meant for close-up killing,” Miller said on Friday. “It's meant for vets to kill an animal by shooting it in the head or somewhere, you know, that's going to be fatal. But it would work the exact same way on humans very effectively and extraordinarily quietly.”

Miller revealed that New York police sought out a firearms expert who examined the video evidence of the crime and raised the prospect of what the weapon, which also has a unique way of firing, could be.

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“Now, as you see it has this large extended silencer that is screwed onto a threaded rather short barrel,” Miller told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But the way the gun works is you fire it with that trigger and then it doesn't automatically load the next round, you have to pull back on the rear of that slide and then let it go to eject one round and feed the next in.”

The analyst said the surveillance video being pored over by investigators – and the country, stunned by the brazen killing of insurance executive Brian Thompson – shows the gunman doing just that. But he added that only so much could be gleaned from the “blurry shot” of the video.

“It may be another weapon, even a ghost gun with a large suppressor or silencer,” he said. Miller then noted the “weird cultural thing” involving the weapon.

“You wouldn't be committing a professional murder with a veterinary gun, but this gun is based on the design of something called the “Welrod,” Miller said. “And even going back to the British and the allied forces in World War II in the 1940s, the “Welrod” was the assassin's weapon. When you fire it with that suppressor, you get a sound like a book hitting a table in a library.”

Watch the clip below or at this link.