Remember that Oswald's hits were made with a telescopic sight at ranges of only 44 and 88 yards over a period of almost nine seconds. Oswald qualified as a mid-level sharpshooter under USMC 'known distance' range qualification regimen.
What's more, milsurp collectors regard the Carcano M38 as a superior military rifle compared to many others fielded by participant nations of WWI and WWII. Certainly several levels better than the Russian Mosin-Nagant. It served the Italians well in conquering Ethiopia and on the Russian Front in WWII. The 6.5x52 Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge was also a popular pre-war safari cartridge both in Europe and here in the United States for it's flat trajectory and penetration characteristics. Good African hunting round even for dangerous game.
Finally, the recent effort to bring more power, range, and terminal wound ballistics to the AR-15 platform has resulted in the adoption of the 6.5 Grendel round used by US Special Forces SOCOM in Afghanistan. That 6.5 Grendel cartridge has almost equal ballistics to the 6.5x52 Carcano round chambered in the Mannlicher-Carcano M38 rifle that Oswald used to murder President Kennedy. I love pointing that out.
To contend that the Fascist blackshirt Italian government settled on arming their troops with a lousy inaccurate rifle firing a weak cartridge (yet designed by Mannlicher, one of the most famous names in 20th Century firearms design and manufactured by house Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta who have experience making some of Europe's finest military arms going all the way back to the crossbows of the Middle Ages) is just foolish.
Bugliosi’s book “Reclaiming History” discusses this at length and completely demolishes the stupid claim that Oswald could have never got off that many shots from that type of rifle, much less hit anything. What the Warren Commission did to evaluate it was pretty impressive, to the point of laying out a range where the target went at the same speed and direction as Kennedy’s car, and a sniper shot from a tower built to the same height.
The sniper did BETTER than what the cynics say was “impossible”.
While Vincent Bugliosi (tried Charles Manson and is the author of “Helter Skelter”) is a leftist, he also has a pretty good mind when he turns it to his specialty, which is law.
He wrote an excellent book about the JFK assassination called “Reclaiming History” that not only exhaustively dispelled nearly ever single assertion by the conspiracy theory people, but also buttressed most of the main points of the Warren Commission.
For example, one of the main contentions is that Oswald could have never fired as many shots as he did, as accurately as he did from the Mannlicher-Carcano. It was characterized as a cheap, inferior product, not accurate, and could not have done what it did. The Warren Commission not only showed contrary opinions from the US Army that the gun was not considered a cheap piece of crap (they considered it a capable weapon long before the assassination) but that a Marine Corps weapons expert could not only shoot the weapon as fast in an environment that simulated the range, speed, relative positions and size of target, but was able to improve on the shooting. (if I recall, the weapons expert said that Oswald likely used the iron sights instead of the scope, as he did during his evaluation of the weapon. Using the scope would have been more difficult in some respects)
But one of the best passages from the book describes how Oswald was giving a lecture to a large audience (in the hundreds) of high powered attorneys, and he posed a question to them: “How many of you believe that there was a conspiracy to murder JFK, and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone?” The response was nearly every single hand in the room was raised.
He then said (I have to paraphrase, don’t have the book) “What if I could convince all of you, in sixty seconds or less, that you are not thinking correctly on the subject?” There was some commotion and loud murmuring from the crowd, and one of them said aloud: “We don’t think you can do it.”
So Bugliosi turned to someone on the stage with him and said “Okay, start timing”. He turned to the crowd and said “How many of you have ever read the Warren Commission Report?”
Only one or two hands went up. Bugliosi said: “As lawyers, isn’t it vitally important, perhaps most important, to weigh all the facts available and to hear both sides of the story before you come to a conclusion? I once had a country lawyer say to me, no matter how thin I make my flapjacks, there are still two sides to them.” He turned to the timer and said asked how much time was left. The timer said twenty seconds.
There wasn’t a single peep of dissent from the audience of assembled lawyers. He later said he wasn’t even questioning whether anyone had read the entire Warren Commission Report (all volumes) but only the summary/
Bugliosi’s point is that the JFK assassination was the most investigated crime in history, for a crime in which with the circumstances, witnesses and physical evidence at hand, he could have decisively convicted the perpetrator in few days under any other circumstances. He acknowledged that there are some inconsistencies, but as he mentioned in each of his other books I have read (”Helter Skelter” and “The Sea Will Tell”) there is no analysis of any event that does not have inconsistencies. The question is always whether those inconsistencies have enough relevance to counterbalance the solid evidence.
Wow, it must really bother you that even after all these years people still don’t buy the crap the gubmint has been trying to sell us on all that happened, in Dallas, that day.
Pleading ignorance, did we have AR’s in ‘62?