Christopher Hixon, a 27-year veteran of the Navy who served in the Persian Gulf, trained with government ammunition that typically had a distinctive “LC” marking on its brass casings.
In 2018, Mr. Hixon, then the athletic director at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., confronted a former student firing an AR-15-style gun. The semiautomatic rifle, modeled on a military weapon, was loaded with ammunition carrying the same “LC” stamp.
Mr. Hixon took a bullet in a thigh. Two more hit him in the chest. In the bloodstained hallway where he died, investigators found a brass casing. And another. By the end of their search, they had collected 84 from across the school — each marked “LC.”
The initials stand for the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant. Built during World War II, the federal site, in Independence, Mo., has made nearly all the rifle cartridges used by the U.S. military since it pulled out of Vietnam.
In recent years, the factory has also pumped billions of rounds of military-grade ammunition into the commercial market, an investigation by The New York Times found, leaving the “LC” signature scattered across crime scenes, including the sites of some of the nation’s most heinous mass shootings.
The plant, operated by a private contractor with Army oversight, is now one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of commercial rounds for the popular AR-15, and it remains so even as the United States supplies ammunition to Ukraine.