Bullets do funny things. They riochet, shatter, split, bounce, tumble, and generally do a lethal cha-cha on any living thing around, assuming they hit something (which they will eventually). Soft materials procude bounces and tumbles and sometimes fragmentation or splits. Hard material can send bullets careening off in any direction. Making sense out of bullet flight paths must be very hard. You can get the initial angle, but after that things get tricky.
That’s exactly what I said, reproducing the “exact shot” is impossible, and it is highly dishonest to rely on this as evidence that there is a conspiracy. We’re working in a fully three dimensional world here, with an x, y, and z axis. Even a slight millimeter difference in any of those three would instantly mean that the “exact same shot” had not been made. Obviously we can’t simulate Oswald’s state of mind. It doesn’t seem like he had much trouble murdering a police officer not long after he murdered the President of the United States. Most people, rightly, believe it to be very hard to kill another person emotionally. But not all people are wired the same, I think there are genuinely people who can kill a person with about as much thought as they give to squashing a bug.
What we can do, and this has been stressed ad infinitum, is show that a shot made at the range, angle, and speed that Oswald is asserted to have made his shots is entirely possible.
The Warren Commission had tests done to reproduce the shot. Some very dishonest conspiracy theorist authors have deliberately lied about the results of these tests. In the tests, the persons doing them were actually able to get the shots off in under 5.6 seconds. That is the lowest that even most conspiracy theorists will go when it comes to claiming how long Oswald had. In truth, the credible evidence suggests Oswald had about 8.5 seconds to squeeze off his shots. But even the 5.6 number has been shown to be possible in testing. One specialist with the FBI even got off three shots in 4.45 seconds using iron sights.
Several conspiracy theorists have claimed that during these tests, the people performing them (all expert marksmen) missed their targets. This is not true, in the first round of tests they all hit their targets. (This can be confirmed by looking at the Warren Commission, this is information which is publicly available to anyone) They took 18 shots in total (some of them with iron sights and at a rate of fire almost double what Oswald was doing) and some did miss, but the majority hit a target approximating a human silhouette.
You set it up, dude, and I’ve got $1,000 that says I can make at least two hits in three shots on my first try in less than 8.5 seconds, providing I get the same amount of practice with the M-C that Oswald had (he had practiced firing it the day before, IIRC.)
Which might explain why he made only two out of three shots when, really, he should have made all three. (Or, presumably, made the first two and then stopped when Kennedy’s head blew up.)
Do you believe John Hinckley was acting alone when he took a shot at Reagan? He was using a weapon far less accurate than a rifle with a scope and there were lots of people rushing around between him and Reagan, but he still managed to get off a very-nearly lethal shot, and a ricochet at that.
Compared to that, Oswald’s feat is not only ridiculously easy, it’s painfully ridiculously easy. He didn’t have to be a trained sniper to accomplish it. His marine training was sufficient, if not far above sufficient. If your notion is that Oswald couldn’t have done it alone because his shot was so very improbable, do you assume Hinckley had an accomplice as well? If not, why not?
It would actually be a lot easier with iron sights. Thats part of the problem with people who keep claiming that it was an easy feat to accomplish…re-reacquiring the target in a scope under that situation…a moving target with obstacles in-between is time consuming.
Not according to most experts, even the ones who believe he did it. If you think was an easy shot, your definitely missing something.
Insofar as I said, in the very first words of my OP (which you quoted), that I believe LHO shot the president, it should be pretty clear that I’ve conceded the point. I don’t happen to believe he (LHO) acted alone. Again, I don’t have any proof at all. Something just doesn’t add up in my mind. I’m also perfectly willing to concede that we will probably never know and don’t have any problem saying “The evidence that we have tends to support LHO acting alone.” That doesn’t preclude there being other evidence out there that we don’t know about.
I bring up the points about the difference between the actual shooting and recreations because I believe that having the President’s head at the other end of the barrel is something that can’t be accounted for no matter how many times you re-create the shot.
Are you really saying that the reproduction should be done, at the actual Dealey Plaza, with actual humans down there in the line of fire, and firing actual real bullets at them? How convenient - you’ve made your hypothesis non-falsifiable.
Is the live oak tree that’s there now, not the same one that was there in 1963? The tree that’s there now looks pretty damn old.
IIRC the tree that was directly in the line of fire was cut down.
Many years ago my father in law was deer hunting with some people he just met fairly recently. He spotted a mule deer an insane distance away, and all he had was a lever action 3030. One of the people in the hunting party offered to let him use their more powerful scoped hunting rifle, but he has a wierd sense of humor and used his gun aiming way above the deer and fire. The deer went down, one in a million shot.
They climbed in a jeep and drove to where the deer was still struggling to get away. Apparently he had shot the deer through both back legs crippling it. He finished off the deer, and then turned to the rest of the people in the party and “I always shoot them in the legs…It wastes less meat that way.”
The difficulty of a dumb luck shot like that…well, it would in fact be impossible to reproduce. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, or there was another shooter firing at that deer that day.
The shots attributed to oswald according to all informed accounts were difficult, but could very well have happened.
I’ve fired literally thousands of rounds from a bolt action military surplus rifle at about that range, and I’m a pretty good shot. I’ve been to the plaza, I’ve seen the photos taken with all the obsticles in place from the actual window (not the one that they let the tourists look out of) and I’m pretty damn certain that I could not make those shots with that rifle under those circumstances unless I was very lucky.
Martin Hyde, I have an even funnier little tidbit about Wecht. In Bugliosi’s book is a smallish chapter entitled, “A Conversation with Dr. Cyril Wecht” (actually, a series of conversations). It follows this pattern: Wecht makes a claim; Bugliosi throws a piece of evidence at him; he checks it out; he comes back and says, Yep, you’re right; he makes another claim; Bugliosi etc., etc. By the end of the chapter Wecht doesn’t appear to have any theory to stand on. No word yet that he has left the ranks of the CTs. . . .
This is what makes Wecht such an odd duck. Clearly he knows how the forensics game is played and he plays it by the rules. Yet he keeps insisting on a conspiracy. I just don’t get it. (Incidentally, in that mock trial of Oswald, Bugliosi handed Wecht’s ass to him.)
I don’t understand this. You do think Oswald shot Kennedy, but you don’t think he had enough on the ball to be a sniper? Well, which is it? If he shot Kennedy, then he did have enough presence of mind to take that particular sniper shot. If he didn’t have enough presence of mind to take that particular sniper shot, then he couldn’t have shot Kennedy. And how does any of this indicate that he wasn’t acting alone?
I think plnnr is saying that Oswald was the only gunner, but he thinks that someone else might have put him up to it.
While I agree that that’s the most plausible JFK conspiracy scenario, knowing about Oswald’s history of being so bizarre-acting, tends to argue against any other conspirators relying on him, and argues for his just doing it himself. Especially the attempted assassination of General Walker a few months before.
and I submitted some of that research to the webmaster at prouty.org, and I also had some communications with Col. Prouty prior to his recent death. There was a general consensus over there, that what information I collected was worthy of inclusion, so it remains there today. Although Col. Prouty wrote me that he was out of the loop wrt to the NASA stuff. So techically, I am not quoting from my own website.
There is a circumstantial link between NASA and Oswald, which Jim Garrison points out in his book, “On the Trail of Assassins”. Something to do with getting a job and working at the New Orleans/Michaud complex. So to bring this up is not completely out of context.
NSAM 271 suggests to me that there was a lot of behind-the-scenes activity during the final weeks of the JFK administration. I have my suspicions that certain ex-Nazis, rightwing extremists, Cubans, and other assorted ‘national security’ skulduggery appears to have been associated with the elimination of Kennedy, and it is possible that Oswald got sucked up into part of that business only as a patsy. There’s an indirect connection with the secret memorandum, to be sure. But it is an important piece of history which should not be ignored in understanding the JFK assassination.
There are a lot of behind the scenes activity in every week of every administration.
Once you have something to back up those suspicions, like evidence, then we can have a meaningful debate. It’s impossible to debate suspicions.
ngant17, it doesn’t matter that it’s not your website. What matters is that you’re citing your own work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, but self-referencing makes for a significantly weaker argument.
Other than that, I’m just wondering if you don’t see that so much of what you’re writing about are tangential red herrings. You’re not connecting dots here; you’re throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing if anything sticks, related or not.
Finally, why did you open the thread in the form of a question if you already had a well thought out (in your mind) theory as to what happened? Usually people ask questions in order to hear answers and various points of view rather than to use them as a launching point for their own polemics.
Oh, so you’re just quoting articles that you wrote on the web site of someone else who has no grasp of what’s credible and what’s not? Technically it’s different, but practically, there’s no difference.
You’re now citing Jim Garrison? The batshit-crazy Jim Garrison?
So all you have is your own suspicion that crazy extremists, who all hate each other, conspired to kill JFK? That’s all you have? I’m sorry, that’s not quite convincing to me.
Let’s be blunt, then. Do you think the Kennedy shot is (choose one):
a - easier than Hinckley’s Reagan shot
b- as easy as Hinckley’s Reagan shot
c- not as easy as Hinckley’s Reagan shot
Hinckley was also firing at “the most powerful man in the world, in broad daylight”, yet got a hit that could very easily have been fatal. If he was acting alone, why is it so difficult to believe Oswald was?
Miller’s already pointed out the contradiction in your statement, in which you claim to believe Oswald shot Kennedy, but simultaneously that it was impossible for Oswald to shoot Kennedy. Can we have a decision?
Y’know, that’s what makes the whole thing fall apart.
If you were an ex-Nazi that wanted to kill Kennedy, how would you go about doing it? Would you get in touch with the Cubans? The right-wing extremists? The FBI?
The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to believe. The easist conspiracy is a conspiracy of one man. One nut who thinks killing Kennedy will solve his problems. And that nut plans the murder himself and carries it out himself. He doesn’t talk about it with other people, other people who could rat him out.
What help does the single shooter need, anyway? He needs help to get a rifle? Not in the United States, where even a public traitor like Oswald could get himself a rifle. He needs help to know where his target is going to be? The schedule was published in the newspapers, and even if the schedule changes unexpectedly you’ve got all the time in the world, just try again some other time. He needed help psyching himself into shooting another human being? Come on, by definition assassins are people who can psych themselves into shooting people, assassination isn’t for everyone but plenty of people are able to kill when they think they have good reason. The shooter needs help escaping? Why? If he can get away from the crime scene, what else does he need? Maybe the shooter shouldn’t go back to his apartment, but getting in a car and driving off into the sunset isn’t exactly a difficult master plan.
It seems to me that the more people the assassin brings into the conspiracy the greater the likelyhood that the conspiracy will fail. Sure, most people who wish a public figure were dead don’t have the wherewithal or the cold-bloodedness to get themselves a gun and do the job themselves. This is why most public figures are still alive.
If Werner von Braun wanted Kennedy dead, why would he get in touch with Oswald? I simply can’t see how this works…a bunch of ex-Nazis are sitting around NASA (see? Nazi==NASA!) headquarters bitching about how Kennedy is going to fuck up their plans, and one of them pipes in that Johnson would never cooperate with the goddam commies like that pussy Kennedy, and then someone else chimes in that he knows a kooky communist who defected to the Soviet Union but was now back in the United States, and he’d make a perfect triggerman. Except instead of just one nutty communist, let’s simultaneously have one or two other guys shooting at Kennedy at exactly the same time. Except if you’ve got one mystery triggerman who can get away clean without leaving evidence behind, why bother involving that patsy Oswald? I mean, what’s the point? If that mystery triggerman ever gets discovered, you can break the link from him to you simply by shooting the motherfucker while he’s being transported from one jail to another. So why do you need a patsy?
The best cover story is the cover story that is the closest to reality. The more evidence that needs to be forged or covered up or destroyed, the worse your cover story is. So if your cover story is that a lone nut took a shot at the president and got lucky, then why not have that lone nut actually take a shot at the president? Why involve other conspirators, doctors, senators, Vice Presidents, NASA administrators, photographers, and so on? Like, if I were going to destroy the World Trade Center, and my cover story was going to be that terrorists hijacked planes and drove them into the World Trade Center, the easiest way to create that cover story is to hijack planes and drive them into the World Trade Center, end of conspiracy. I don’t need to preset explosive charges, I don’t need to confiscate video evidence, I don’t need to keep people away from the wreckage, I don’t need to hide ANYTHING. Why bother doing anything else, why bother planting agents at the Air Traffic Control centers, why bother doing aything else? Just carry out the attack, and that’s it. See how that works?
With regard to the issue of the difficult shots (and I feel like I’ve made this comment before):
If you believe that LHO was a bad shot, or the shot was difficult, then I submit that LHO’s performance on Nov. 22, 1963, corroborates your assertion! Do you honestly think his intention was to scare JFK with his first shot, injure him with his second, and then kill him with his third? Or, do you think he was attempting to blow up the back of JFK’s head, and it took him 3 tries to accomplish the feat? If that latter, then you can believe the shot was difficult, that LHO was struggling with fear and nerves, and that the murder happened as the evidence indicates.
I’d also like to say that I, too, was a conspiracy theorist for a long time. I loved the movie JFK, and wrote essays on the conspiracy in high school. But, my fascination with Kennedy, and his murder (I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself) led me to continue to explore the facts. And that exploration led me to the sad conclusion that a lone fuckup really can change the course of history. It doesn’t mean I believe that the U.S. is never up to no good (there’s lots of documented scandal out there to research!); I’ve retained a healthy dose of skepticism. But I’m also not going to accept wild speculation that doesn’t fit with the facts.
So, really, it’s okay to change your mind. Come over to the lone gunman side. The facts are over here.