Montana GOP Senate Candidate Says He Lied to Ranger About Gunshot Wound in 2015

The Sheehy campaign did not respond to the ranger’s contention that he inspected the weapon or saw a missing bullet but noted the ranger did not mention a missing bullet in his report from the time. Watkins called the ranger’s more recent recollections “a fabrication.”

The ranger, who said he is a Marine Corps veteran, said he has voted for Tester but was not motivated by partisanship to answer questions. “It’s just the truth,” he said.

“I don’t in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” Sheehy said of the ranger’s written account. “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”

Watkins also wrote that Sheehy could not have accidentally discharged the Colt .45 by dropping the gun because “doing so is not possible based on the design of the weapon’s firing mechanism.”

Rick Vasquez, a firearms expert and former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives official, said it would indeed be “very unlikely” for that weapon to misfire when dropped as Sheehy told the ranger.

As for Sheehy’s fear of being court-martialed, Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security, said she believed it was highly unlikely that a civilian hospital would report a years-old bullet wound to the Navy or that anyone would fear such a report would result in an investigation.

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