Ignoring the points made about the space race and all kinds of other stuff that has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, I’d like to get back to the shooting itself.
denquixote and ngant17 both make the claim that this shot has never been reproduced by experts. I believe that is entirely possible and also entirely worthless as a point of argument. I’ll openly admit, I don’t indulge in conspiracy theories, I consider them to be “intellectual porn” and to have deleterious effects on the healthy skepticism so necessary to sift through the bullshit of modern life. So I don’t know much about the JFK assassination–I don’t even know the ballistic specifics of where the shots first entered JFK’s body and what the bullets did and et cetera, I’ve seen some CGI representations of what happened a few times and read about it a few times, but not so much that I remember the particulars.
Like others who have posted here, I have, in my life, had to qualify with a rifle. As other posters with military experiences have said, you have to be able to successfully hit targets at greater range than Oswald hit Kennedy. This was not an especially difficult shot, weather conditions were okay, Kennedy was moving very slowly.
I’m not someone who has the accuracy and skills of a sniper, I wouldn’t win any Olympic marksmanship contests, but I’m someone who has been shooting rifles since I was at least 12 years old when my dad took me out to shoot a little .22. I’ve shot at moving targets before, I’ve hit moving targets before–I’m a relatively avid hunter and have hit game while it was moving (at a slow pace through the forest.) All that aside, I could be someone who has never touched a rifle in my life, and what I say would be equally true and equally verifiable. A shot at a target moving under 15 mph at the range and angle from which Oswald made his shot is very, very, easy.
Give me three shots at such a target and I’d bet you the deed to my home that the person I was shooting at would be struck sans anything getting in my way (like a diving secret service agent somehow.) While I wouldn’t bet my house that the person would be dead after those three shots, I’d be reasonably certain they would be mortally wounded.
What I can’t do, and maybe no one can do is reproduce the exact shot Oswald made. Could I have hit and killed Kennedy? Assuming I had the “intestinal fortitude” the desire and the cold heartedness to shoot someone who was no danger to me in cold blood while his wife was riding beside him, yes, I could do the physical act itself–it was no great feat. I can’t guarantee that my bullet would enter Kennedy’s body 2.5 centimeters below the base of his skull and then exit and strike Governor Connally’s leg or whatever and et cetera. That may be something very hard to impossible to precisely reproduce. What is easy to reproduce is what happened–killing shots hitting Kennedy. But likewise, put an animal carcass on the road and let me shoot at it from above and I’m willing to bet if you took a team of twenty of the best marksmen in the history of the world they would probably all fail to exactly reproduce my shot. Meaning their shots would fail to exactly reproduce the precise entry point and precisely replicate the effects on the carcass to 100% accuracy, but they would definitely hit the carcass and could probably hit it very very close to where I hit it.
Bullets don’t behave in a perfectly uniform manner when they strike any living body, but the same type of ammunition fired from the same weapon hitting in roughly the same area will usually behave very very close to the same. An extremely slight difference in where the bullet enters may result in the exact same ultimate outcome (a deceased target), but radically different forensics (for example maybe the bullet will ricochet inside the body off of a bone, maybe it won’t, maybe it will come apart inside the body more in one shot versus another…and et cetera.) Basically what I’m saying is, expert marksmen could reproduce what Oswald did–hitting a target fatally using three shots in a given time span. What they can’t reproduce to 100% accuracy is the exact behavior of the shots that killed Kennedy, but that is an unrealistic expectation. I can prove this if I had the resources by showing that if you let me fire into a propped up animal carcass, then we do forensic testing to see EXACTLY what happened inside that carcass, there’s probably less than 0.5% chance that someone taking the exact same shot can get the EXACT SAME FORENSIC RESULTS, but that is meaningless. All that shows is that when a bullet hits a “weirdly composed target” of muscle, fat, flesh, blood, bones, brain matter et cetera, you’re not going to get 100% uniform results even if you hit the precisely same target at very near the same spot. But that is functionally meaningless because just a failure to reproduce the precise effects of the shot will not discredit the fact that the key feature of the shot (its lethality and its feasibility at that range) can easily be proven.
Quibbling over a point like this is, in my opinion, strongly suggestive of 1) ignorance of how bullets behave when they hit a human body or 2) the last stand of people who should know better than to try and argue a point like this.