Weitzman and Boone executed sworn affidavits which were ignored by the Warren Commission.
Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, Warner, 1988, pages 114-115:
However, to complicate the issue, three empty cartridges from a Mannlicher-Carcano were found in the same room as the Mauser. They were near the easternmost sixth-floor window, close together and almost parallel to each other. Although this arrangement made them easy to find, it defied what any experienced user of rifles knows: that when a rifle is fired, the cartridge is flung violently away. A neat distribution pattern of cartridges like the one found on the sixth floor of the Depository is virtually impossible. It strongly suggested to me that the cartridges were never fired from the assassin's lair but were planted near the window, presumably having been fired earlier elsewhere, so that bullet fragments found in the President's limousine could be described as having come from the Carcano.
There were other problems with the story that the Mannlicher-Carcano had been the murder weapon. For instance, no ammunition clip was ever found. The clip is the device that feeds the cartridges into the rifle's firing chamber. Without such a clip, the cartridges have to be loaded by hand, making fast shooting such as Oswald was alleged to have done impossible. The Warren Commission skirted this problem by never confronting that fact.
Complicating the matter even further, the Mannlicher-Carcano triumphantly produced as the "assassin's rifle" was found to have a badly misaligned sight. So badly was the sight out of line with the barrel that an adjustment was necessary before government riflemen could complete their test firing. Even so, no rifle expert was ever able to duplicate the feat the government attributed to Lee Oswald.
Dspite these problems, when the smoke cleared and all the law enforcement authoritiees in Dallas had their stories duly in order, the official position was that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository was the Mannlicher-Carcano, which allegedly was linked to Oswald under an alias, and not the Mauser, which disappeared forever shortly after it reached the hands of Captain Fritz.
But even this revision of the official story did not explain the third rifle. A film taken by Dallas Cinema Associates, an independent film company, showed a scene of the Book Depository shortly after the assassination. Police officers on the fire escape were bringing down a rifle from the roof above the sixth floor with the tender care you might give an infant. When the policemen reached the ground, a high-ranking officer held the rifle high for everyone to see. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Beneath the picture was the legend, "The Assassin's Rifle." When I saw this film, I noted that this rifle had no sight mounted on it. Thus it could not have been either the Carcano or the vanished Mauser, both of which had sights.
I was not surprised to find that this third rifle, like the Mauser, had disappeared. But its existence confirmed my hypothesis that Lee Oswald could not have killed John Kennedy as the American public had been told. Setting aside the evidence of two other weapons on the scene, the incredibly accurate shooting of an incredibly inaccurate rifle within an impossible time frame was merely the beginning of the feat we were asked to believe Oswald had accomplished.
I knew from his fellow Marines' testimony that Oswald was a notoriously poor shot. But this job would have been impossible for even the greatest marksman.
Craig Roberts, Kill Zone, CPI, 1994, pages 89-90:
According to my friend, Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, the former senior instructor for the U.S. Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School at Quantico, Virginia, it could not be done as described by the FBI investigators. Gunny Hathcock, now retired, is the most famous American military sniper in history. In Vietnam he was credited with 93 confirmed kills--and a total of over 300 actual kills counting those unconfirmed. He now conducts police SWAT team sniper schools across the country. When I called him to ask if he had seen the Zapruder film, he chuckled and cut me off. "Let me tell you what we did at Quantico," he began. "We reconstructed the whole thing: the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don't know how many times we tried it, but we couldn't duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. Now if I can't do it, how in the world could a guy who was a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified 'marksman' do it?"
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