I’ve just seen this "documentary"on Youtube, analyzing the JFK assassination. It has the premise that when Oswald started shooting, a secret service agent returning fire accidentally discharged his weapon, and shot Kennedy in the head.
Evidence for this is the alleged fact that the entry wound in the skull was 6mm, but Oswald’s gun fired 6.5mm bullets. See from about 14m40s onwards.
I don’t know anything at all about analyzing entry wounds. If that claim about the entry wound is true at all, is there any reasonable explanation that doesn’t require a second shooter? Could a 6.5mm bullet ever leave a 6mm hole? Does bone expand slightly as a bullet passes through, then contact afterwards? Or perhaps the size of the hole is approximate. Something else?
Please just stick to this one specific question. No discussion about the rest of the evidence or JFK conspiracy theories in general. Note that I’m not convinced by the claims.
Hmm. Well, 0.5 mm is not a crazy discrepancy if you’re trying to measure a hole in a cranium with calipers.
Also, fired rifle bullets are not of a uniform diameter. The rifling inscribes the bullet, so it has helical pits that match the rifling lands. Those pits have a smaller diameter than the lands.
If it were me, I’d want to measure the hole with a 6.5 mm Carcano bullet that had been fired into something very soft. I’d use the fired bullet as a pin gage. If the bullet goes through the hole without too much persuasion, the nominal measurement of 6.0 mm is irrelevant. An actual pin gage would work fine too, but a fired bullet is what that gage represents—why not use the real thing?
Pete, the “documentary” brought up the Secret Service accidental shooter, and I feel we should recognize that he would have been armed with a 9, 10, or 11mm pistol, unless he was totin’ a .22. A half-millimeter discrepancy is less than 0.02", or about 1/64". Likely the hole measurement was off, understandable due to the tiny dimensions.
OK, my mistake - I jumped to a conclusion, not having the stomach to watch this thing before shooting (heh) off my mouth. Didn’t see the bit about the long gun until after I posted.
Skipped around in the video, don’t care to watch conspiracy crap. I stand by the measurement inaccuracy, though.
So a couple issues with the description of the conspiracy theory:
Both measurements are expressed in whole millimeters. We could just be looking at a precision of the measurement issue.
The measurements published aren’t the size of the wound through the bone. It’s the measurement of the laceration in the scalp. That’s a soft tissue measurement. The wound in the skull is merely expressed as corresponding. If there was a big difference they presumably wouldn’t have described it that way. The difference is 1/4mm on each side of the wound channel, though. That tiny difference might be explained by the flesh pushing back or being moved during handling of the remains.
It’s not a neat circular hole. Oswald didn’t shoot a flat surface at a perpendicular angle. He shot an irregularly shaped surface at an angle. The tip of the bullet is quite a bit less than 6.5 mm. Trying to gauge the diameter of the widest part of the bullet by the narrowest part of the irregular wound channel is a real issue in the theory. They’d have to show their work to justify that the widest portion of the bullet would have had to traverse the entire 15 mm wound channel. I’m guessing they didn’t.
I take your point about 6.5 mm Carcano bullets actually measuring 6.8 mm in diameter. Even so, Dino’s point about the lack of a clear measurement of the cranial bullet hole is substantial. All we know is that it “corresponded” to a flesh wound that would be inherently difficult to measure.
We know that a soft-tissue wound channel expands at the moment of impact and then closes to a degree. It seems likely that the soft tissue near the back of the head would have done the same thing.
If the report didn’t mention an exacting measurement of the hole in the skull, I’m inclined to ignore the lack of precision. There are too many other factors that could account for it.
The conspiracy claim is that JFK was shot by a .223 bullet from an AR-15 held by a Secret Service agent following JFK’s car.
I’d go with lack of precision in the measurement.
I’d also note that there are lines in skin tissue, the names of which I can’t recall, where if you cut across them, the skin will open up. If you cut along them, the cut won’t change. Thus any cut in the skin can be distorted just through the nature of the skin itself. Trying to measure a hole in the cranium based on the skin hole measurements won’t work.
From Wikipedia: Photograph of Secret Service Agent George W. Hickey carrying an ArmaLite AR-15 shorty after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, November 22, 1963.