Understood on the price point. Way on up into the later 60s and even into the 70s, you could buy a lot of military surplus rifles dirt cheap. Heck, for many years you could buy a surplus SKS for $50-$60, until the market finally became aware of what a decent little semi-auto it was/is.
My own classification of the O-rifle as a clunker was based on the sloppiness of the action as compared to most bolt-action rifles I’ve shucked, and I’ve shucked a few. I can only say that my own memory of the rifle tends to corroborate the claim of these Italian chaps who claim you just can’t fire three shots that quickly with that rifle.
MM (in TX)
Unless it jams, a 'sloppy bolt' does not take 3+ seconds to cycle, and thats all the time Oswald needed.
Plus, as other posters here have pointed out, there were multiple generations of that rifle and the one Oswald used was manufactured pre-WWII when quality control was much higher than later years during the war when pressures were causing sloppy workmanship.
At any rate, to dismiss the overwhelming body of evidence that Oswald was the sole actor based on a 'sloppy bolt' you felt on a 50 year old weapon that might have been machined in some garage is not a convincing argument to me. The rifle Oswald used was test fired and it worked perfectly and they were able to duplicate the shots he took.
Let me ask you this. If Oswald had paid a $1000 for some custom made target weapon, would you then believe that he did it?
We all hate to believe that a President can be killed by a nut case with some cheep-ass weapon, but even before Kennedy, there were three other presidents killed by nut cases with cheep ass weapons.