Replies

It's hard to imagine firing a bolt-action that slow unless there is some problem with feeding or ejecting shells. Was the actual firing distance 75 feet? That is incredibly short, it's a pistol shot. Why do so many say that the shooter had to be such a marksman? Makes no sense. It's a question of intent, not skill.

It was a HELL of a lot more than 75 feet. Drive through the Plaza yourself...

"Why do so many say that the shooter had to be such a marksman?"

I'm not trying to say that "marksmanship" is the issue as much as I am trying to say that being an expert is.

AS one report says, . . .

"The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President Kennedy, firing three shots and hitting Kennedy with two of them. The Commission leaned toward the view that Oswald fired the three shots in less than six seconds. Most lone-gunman theorists now claim that Oswald fired three shots in 8.4 seconds. They assert that he fired and missed at right around frame 160 of the Zapruder film. However, in order to accept this claim, we would have to believe that for his first and closest shot Oswald completely missed, not only Kennedy, but the entire limousine. This would have been a truly staggering miss from Oswald's alleged position in the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Texas School Book Depository Building. He would have been firing down at the car from a distance of less than 140 feet. However, even assuming that Oswald fired and missed at around frame 160, this would mean that he fired his next two shots in less than 5.6 seconds and hit Kennedy with both of them, which still would have been a skillful performance, especially since the FBI and the Army established that the alleged murder weapon, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, could not be fired faster than 2.3 seconds per shot, even in the hands of experienced, expert riflemen. Lone-gunman theorists claim that subsequent Carcano rifle tests proved that the weapon could be fired in around 1.6 seconds per shot, but these tests did not use the same Carcano that Oswald allegedly fired. The FBI and the Army found that THAT Carcano could not be fired faster than 2.3 seconds per shot, even when used by expert shooters. For years the "traditional" lone-gunman scenario was that Oswald scored two hits out of three shots in less than six seconds. This is really the only plausible shooting scenario if one assumes that there was only one assassin and that he fired from the sixth-floor window."