"...the thingness of something becomes apparent when it is no longer functioning as it did before or it becomes dysfunctional or if it appears in an unexpected place..."
But why do we need to know that “the bullet was fired from a Cold War era Skorpion sub-machinegun.” How does that help the reader understand the injustice or the cruelty or the pointlessness of the person’s death? Or could it just be a bit of surreptitious gun porn?