# How good of a shot was Lee Harvey Oswald? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 10, 2014, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094 "2014-09-10T17:41:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![appleciders](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85f322/32.png) [@appleciders](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/appleciders)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/61 "2014-09-11T15:47:06Z")
> [@psychonaut](#): > > _Supposed_ connections? Do you dispute that the man openly professed to be a Communist, defected to the USSR, and lived there for several years? No, I posted before checking and so hedged my bets. On checking, clearly he had Soviet connections. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/62 "2014-09-11T15:48:36Z")
'Course, it does give us _JFK_ as an example of how you can take a pile of BS and tinfoil hats, and make a good movie.\* JFK\* is great filmmaking, very bad history, kinda like _Birth of a Nation_. ---
**Author:** ![Tread](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/53a042/32.png) [@Tread](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tread)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/63 "2014-09-11T15:51:54Z")
> [@Crotalus](#): > > The only thing I have to add to the previous posters is that a visit to the 6th Floor Museum in the book depository building will erase any illusions one might have about the difficulty of the shots. The X on the street does not look far away at all. Easy shots with a scoped rifle. I have yet to visit, so out of curiosity, on the point of reference… how large is the X in comparison to a human head? ---
**Author:** ![Capt\_Kirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@Capt\_Kirk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt_Kirk)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/64 "2014-09-11T15:51:58Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > No, you’re all wrong. It wasn’t JFK and Oswald at all. The entire event was faked by NASA on a sound stage in Burbank using scale models and stop motion animation. However, due to a mismatch between the English units that the American engineers who built the sets were used to and the metric units that Swedish stop-motion animators used for the scale figurines and vehicles, Dealey Plaza looks way out of scale with reality. If you look carefully in the background you can see a fuzzy out-of-focus image of a giant ant in an alleyway which had walked onto the set while filming. > > And that’s why you shouldn’t mix units or outsource critical parts of your vast conspiracy to Swedish effects houses. Also, don’t bring powdered doughnuts onto your film set, because that’s how you get ants. > > Stranger The Swedes, now I understand. The damn Swedes. Now I know why the bullet was metric, never understood why it wasn’t a 308 Winchester the caliber any good Merican assassin would use. The damn Swedes **Capt** ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/65 "2014-09-11T16:06:11Z")
> [@appleciders](#): > > No, I posted before checking and so hedged my bets. On checking, clearly he had Soviet connections. Which he reneged, and became all pro-Cuba later, which goes to show something, although exactly what, I’m not sure. But here was a guy who was openly Marxist, to the point of moving to the Soviet Union, and trying to defect, then when the USSR doesn’t embrace him as a symbol of how corrupt the west is, and just relegates him to being a factory worker in the Ukraine, he gets disenchanted, and decided to un-defect, come back to the US, and be all about Cuba. He is shocked when no reporters greet him at the airport. If the CIA was looking for a guy to recruit for its assassination team, Oswald wasn’t it. Actually, if they wanted someone who was an American who could get along with Soviets, keep a low profile, speak flawless Russian, had military experience, was so-so on Kennedy, but a Democrat, so not immediately suspicious as being radically anti-Kennedy, my father was perfect. Seriously. And no one ever tried to recruit him for any assassination team. The only strike against him was that he was Jewish, and there were people who automatically questioned the patriotism of anyone who was Jewish, but my father put himself through college in the Airforce ROTC. He then became a military Russian interpreter, and after working intercepting Soviet radio signals and translating them for two years in active service, he went to grad school in Leningrad. He was actually quite patriotic, but very quite about his politics, so no one really know how he felt, one way or another, about Communism, and he spoke Russian so well by the end of his time in Leningrad, that he got thrown out of a hard currency store, where Soviet citizens weren’t permitted, only foreigners with foreign currency. My father was a hard-working, keep-his-nose-clean, get-good-grades, non-procrastinator, who still wasn’t a show-off, and didn’t like being the center of attention, which Oswald seems to have loved. My father also was a good shot in his Airforce qualifications. With people like my father available, there’s no way the CIA would have recruited a high school drop-out whose most salient characteristic seems to have been being a drama queen. ---
**Author:** ![Frazzled](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/frazzled/32/3368_2.png) [@Frazzled](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frazzled)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/66 "2014-09-11T17:15:34Z")
> [@Tread](#): > > I have yet to visit, so out of curiosity, on the point of reference… how large is the X in comparison to a human head? Pretty close actually. It’s a small X in the middle lane of traffic. If you’re driving you may not even notice it if you’re paying attention to traffic. Officially the X isn’t sanctioned by the city and workers occasionally go out and remove it but within a day it will reappear in exactly the same spot and the city will let it stay there undisturbed for a few months until they go through the motions of removing it again. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/67 "2014-09-11T17:19:30Z")
> [@Mr.Kobayashi](#): > > Question was inspired by _Full Metal Jacket_. In it the Drill Sergeant says _‘‘He [Oswald] was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian bolt action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a head shot.’’_ > > Thanks for the replies, I’ve never even shot a rifle so I’ve no frame of reference for how tricky the shots would be. It’s a great line in the movie, but it’s not describing something in any way remarkable; the DI himself says something to the effect of “_when you leave my island you will all be able to do the same thing_.” Pretty much everything has been touched on from the short range, remarkably easy shot, the slow movement and almost zero deflection on the motion of the target, but to add: there is absolutely nothing remarkable about being able to fire three rounds from a bolt action rifle in six seconds; even more so when you consider that he already had a round chambered and the stopwatch starts when he first pulls the trigger. All he had to do was operate the bolt, aim and fire two more times in six seconds. Prior to WWI the British Army trained to fire at least 20 aimed shots a minute with the Lee-Enfield, which required reloading the 10 round magazine with 5 round charger clips. [ > [@](#): > > The fast-operating Lee bolt-action and 10-round magazine capacity enabled a well-trained rifleman to perform the “mad minute” firing 20 to 30 aimed rounds in 60 seconds, making the Lee-Enfield the fastest military bolt-action rifle of the day. The current world record for aimed bolt-action fire was set in 1914 by a musketry instructor in the British Army—Sergeant Instructor Snoxall—who placed 38 rounds into a 12-inch-wide (300 mm) target at 300 yards (270 m) in one minute. ]([Lee–Enfield - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee-Enfield))The other thing is that if properly maintained bolt action rifles will remain as serviceable as the day they were manufactured for decades. One of the more popular bolt action rifles in civilian use in the US nowadays is the [Mosin–Nagant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosin%E2%80%93Nagant) due to the cheapness with which they can be bought; with the end of the Cold War the market was flooded with millions of them that had been held in stock by the former Soviet Army. The Carcano was apparently fairly widely used during the [Libyan Civil War as well](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcano): > [@](#): > > During the Libyan civil war in 2011, many rebels went into battle with their personally-owned weapons, including old bolt-action rifles and shotguns. Of these, Carcano-style rifles and carbines have been the most frequently observed style of bolt-action rifle. They were predominantly used by rebels in the Nafusa Mountains. These old weapons saw combat once again due to the rebels’ limited access to modern firearms. Additionally, some Libyan rebels preferred to use their familiar hunting weapons over the more modern, yet unfamiliar, assault rifles available.[7][8] According to Al-Fitouri Muftah, a member of the rebel military council overseeing the western mountain front, as many as 1 in 10 rebels in the region were armed with World War II-era weapons. ---
**Author:** ![Crotalus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crotalus/32/41_2.png) [@Crotalus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crotalus)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/68 "2014-09-11T17:45:36Z")
Like Frazzled said, it is pretty close, probably a bit bigger, because they want people to be able to see it from the 6th floor without a scope. [Here](http://goo.gl/maps/uNPlH) is a shot of it in Google Maps. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/69 "2014-09-11T18:05:01Z")
I owned a Carcano rifle like Oswald’s for a while. It was about as good as any military bolter of the time. They all have their good points and bad points. It was certainly more than adequate for the shooting that Oswald did that day. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/70 "2014-09-11T20:43:15Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > …there is absolutely nothing remarkable about being able to fire three rounds from a bolt action rifle in six seconds; even more so when you consider that he already had a round chambered and the stopwatch starts when he first pulls the trigger. It’s even less remarkable nowadays, because the six-second guess was made assuming it was the second shot that missed. With more analysis in recent years, there’s a pretty convincing case that it was the first shot that missed, giving Oswald between eight and nine seconds to shoot three shots (4 to 4.5 second spacing). ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/71 "2014-09-11T23:43:09Z")
Sorry, no cite, but I swear I heard (either in an article, or on a documentary) that if someone had fired from the grassy knoll at that point, they would have hit _Jackie_, and not JFK. (Obviously this was determined studying all the angles and forensic and physics and whatnot) ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/72 "2014-09-12T00:03:59Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > It’s a great line in the movie, but it’s not describing something in any way remarkable [you will be able to do what Oswald did, including the “head shot.”] Perfect case of drawing the target around the dart. I’m sure this has a name in the list of logical fallacies, but it’s not coming to me right now. In any event, it’s only slightly remarkable if we know that Oswald was aiming for the head. We don’t know that, and from knowing what his military training would have been like, plus where the other shot hit (in Kennedy’s throat), we can guess Oswald was aiming for a compromise between his training for center mass, and the fact that Kennedy was sitting in a car that made center mass difficult. The head shot was most likely a lucky shot. Asking someone to repeat it is like firing at the side of a barn, and then challenging someone to hit the very same spot you just hit. ---
**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/73 "2014-09-12T00:30:31Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > In any event, it’s only slightly remarkable if we know that Oswald was aiming for the head. We don’t know that, and from knowing what his military training would have been like, plus where the other shot hit (in Kennedy’s throat), we can guess Oswald was aiming for a compromise between his training for center mass, and the fact that Kennedy was sitting in a car that made center mass difficult Oswald’s goal was to kill JFK, was it not? His goal was to remove JFK from power. A soldier’s goal is 1. To maximize the chance of hitting the target. 2. To remove the opposing soldier as an immediate threat. A casualty with a GSW in the chest is supposedly better than a KIA. That’s because while it is true that some casualties can shoot back, most of the time, at least 1 or more soldiers will be caring for the casualty until he can be evacuated from the battlefield. That takes prevents 2+ soldiers from shooting back. If you cause a KIA, his buddies will be able to fight back with their full attention. If Oswald shot JFK in the chest, most possible chest shots would have caused a survivable wound. The president might have been out of it for a month, and might have had his vice president temporarily take power, but he would probably have been able to return to work. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Kobayashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4af34b/32.png) [@Mr.Kobayashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Kobayashi)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/74 "2014-09-12T00:32:12Z")
Appropriately enough, it’s known as the [Texas sharpshooter fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy). ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/75 "2014-09-12T00:49:07Z")
I am fond of saying that the world is broken up into two groups; those who have fired a rifle and those who have not, and everyone who thinks LHO did something amazing is in the group that has not. One of the more revealing experiences of my life was when I joined the Army and learned to use a rifle, and learned how easy it is to hit things. We started off on the FN-CA1, a big 7.62, and hitting targets at 100 and 200 metres seemed, to me, preposterously easy. We transitioned to the C7, which was the non-scoped version at the time, and it seemed easier still. I would have considered it a serious miss to not hit a target the size of a human head. The minimum standard in the Forces was a 6-inch grouping to get points in the annual qualification, and I always made it with ease, and while I was better than average, almost everyone qualified on the first go. Rifles are built and designed to make it easy to hit things far away with accuracy. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/76 "2014-09-12T00:48:52Z")
I am fond of saying that the world is broken up into two groups; those who have fired a rifle and those who have not, and everyone who thinks LHO did something amazing is in the group that has not. One of the more revealing experiences of my life was when I joined the Army and learned to use a rifle, and learned how easy it is to hit things. We started off on the FN-CA1, a big 7.62, and hitting targets at 100 and 200 metres seemed, to me, preposterously easy. We transitioned to the C7, which was the non-scoped version at the time, and it seemed easier still. I would have considered it a serious miss to not hit a target the size of a human head. The minimum standard in the Forces was a 6-inch grouping to get points in the annual qualification, and I always made it with ease, and while I was better than average, almost everyone qualified on the first go. Rifles are built and designed to make it easy to hit things far away with accuracy. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelEmouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/michaelemouse/32/101_2.png) [@MichaelEmouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelEmouse)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/77 "2014-09-12T00:54:51Z")
I presume you were fond of double taps : ) Yes, at such a distance, the main impediment to accuracy would be how one handles stress across people and situations. ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/78 "2014-09-12T00:56:52Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > I am fond of saying that the world is broken up into two groups; those who have fired a rifle and those who have not, and everyone who thinks LHO did something amazing is in the group that has not. > [@RickJay](#): > > I am fond of saying that the world is broken up into two groups … Overly fond, apparently. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Capt\_Kirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@Capt\_Kirk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt_Kirk)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/79 "2014-09-12T00:57:01Z")
I think we can assume that LHO was going for a headshot. President Kennedy was sitting in a car that left just his head and a bit of his shoulders exposed, remember that his back was largely immobilized from his war injuries. There just wasn’t much else to shoot at. Just went a looked a the pics on wiki, you might be able to squeeze a bullet above the seat top and into the heart but in the scope the largest chunk of JFK that would be visible would be his head. **Capt** ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094/80 "2014-09-12T01:26:52Z")
Military training might tell you one thing, but that doesn’t mean Lee Harvey Oswald followed it. I mean, I assume it was at least implicit in his training that shooting the president was undesirable. Besides the practical reasons mentioned, might he have been going for something spectacular? A shot to the head from a rifle certainly would be, in a horrible way. At least one other post in this thread suggests Oswald liked attention (although he obviously didn’t want attention on him personally in this case). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-good-of-a-shot-was-lee-harvey-oswald/698094.md?page=5)