He couldn’t. The back brace made it nearly impossible for him to bend. Falling sideways across her lap was about his only option.
In the end, it was probably the brace that killed him. The throat shot was probably survivable and would have knocked most people into a forward-folded heap, eliminating the chance of the kill shot. But JFK literally had a rod up his spine holding him straight.
Oddly enough, he said the same thing about Marylin Monroe.
Are you saying he got her with a head shot?
To the face.
Well, going the other way, I’ve always believed MM could fuck someone’s brains out… mumble mumble Furry Knoll* mumble hurm*.
At the time of the head shot, he had already been shot through the neck, and was grabbing his throat.
No, the shots did come from the grassy knoll. All the films of the incident were photoshopped to make it look like the bullets came from Oswald’s position.
Photoshop® didn’t exist in 1963? I know: That’s where the wormhole comes into play.
I read a book that claims the first shot was right before the turn which IIRC would mean Oswald would have had 8 seconds to get of the rest of the shots.
Seriously? Because no it wasn’t. It’s an easy shot. “Known to be unreliable” doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to jam if you fire three shots. It means if you fire hundreds of rounds you might get a jam.
You do not have to be an elite marksman to shoot someone from 100 yards.
As for the difficulty of exactly replicating Oswald’s shots (including one complete miss), well, it’s hard to exactly replicate any shot. Oswald wasn’t trying to exactly make the exact series of shots he turned out to have made, he was trying to put at least one bullet into Kennedy’s brain. JFK Reloaded penalizes you if you kill Kennedy cleanly with one shot.
Seriously, go to Dallas, climb up into the sniper’s nest in the book depository, and then tell me how hard it would be to shoot Kennedy from there. It wasn’t hard. it was easy.
Using a pink elephant with a high powered rifle also worked - they never found the pink elephant.
That’s correct. The first loading and working of the action could, of course, have happened any amount of time prior to the first shot. He could have loaded and cocked the gun hours before for all we know.
It’s between 5.6 and 8 seconds between the moment of the first shot and the third. So he has already pulled the trigger when the “stopwatch”, if you will, begins. Then he worked the bolt, fired, worked the bolt, fired.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Seriously, go to Dallas, climb up into the sniper’s nest in the book depository, and then tell me how hard it would be to shoot Kennedy from there. It wasn’t hard. it was easy.
[/QUOTE]
Something you need to understand is that people who have no experience with rifles don’t know how easy it is to fire them accurately. I know it was an incredible shock to me when I joined the Army how accurate rifles are (and I fired several kinds.) That we could so easily hit targets 100 metres away was a revelation to me, and I think a lot of my fellow recruits. By the time I’d gone to the range a few times I would, the 100 metres, quite reliably hit a target the size of a man’s head on almost every shot. This amazed me, I really had no idea, and it gives one a sense of awe at the precision with with rifles are made, as well as the sheer speed of the bullets they fire.
Until someone has actually had the experience of using a rifle they can’t really grasp how easy it is. 100 metres seems like a LONG way. Aside from shooting a person has generally no experience at all with personally making an object travel that far in a controlled and accurate fashion; 40-50 metres is about as far as most people can throw any sort of object.
“Wow!” is right!
That stabilization really makes the moment stand out for me.
Was the throat wound in of itself enough to kill him, through blood loss or suffocation, eventually?
Just to add and in complete agreement to the quoted post. I can do the assassination shots with any decent bolt action rifle using iron sights, no scope. The shots are that easy. I am no expert marksman and haven’t fired a bolt action rifle in years excepting a .22 a few months ago but really the shots are that easy. I am happy to prove this if need be.
The Reaver(Capt)
I don’t know if any of you have watched “Top Shot” on the History channel, but it’s a shooting competition that often requires shots much more difficult than what Oswald accomplished.
Have a look at the section starting at about 27:00 in this video. This was a speed competition, where the contestants had to run up a hill while stopping at four stations along the way. At each station they had to pick up the weapon, load it, adjust the sights if necessary, then shoot a target downrange before going to the next station. The target is about the size of a human head.
The first station was a pistol shot at 50 ft. The next station was a rifle shot from 100 yards, using an HK93 with iron sights. The third station was a shot with a Mosin-Nagant scoped rifle at 125 yards, and the last station was a 150 yard shot with an SVT-40 scoped rifle.
Bear in mind that these guys are having to do this under physical exertion, where your heart is beating madly and your breathing is hard. The first guy up hits 4/4 targets with a single shot each. I added up the times starting from when he was finally in shooting position behind the rifle, and the three rifle shots together took him about 15 seconds - all from elevated positions, all at ranges farther than Oswald’s shot. If you start counting after the first rifle shot is made, we’re down to 11 seconds. And this from a shooter who had no time to practice the exact shot and who wasn’t familiar with any of the weapons.
So, removing the time required to climb the hill and load the weapons:
The next guy went 4/4, with the time between the first shot and the last about 10 seconds.
The third guy goes 4/4, with the time between the first and the last about 7-8 seconds
Fourth guy, 4/4, about the same time
It wasn’t until the fifth shooter that anyone even missed a shot. At much longer ranges than Oswald’s shot, under heavy physical exertion, shooting rifles they weren’t familiar with. Oh, and there was a fairly stiff breeze blowing, too.
Oswald’s shot was just not a problem for a halfway competent rifleman.
Oh, I dunno. I see it all the time.
I would think that taking the shot as the motorcade approached him would have made Oswald an almost immediate target for return fire by the Secret Service.
Plus the windshield and the bubble-top crossbar and John Connally are all in the way of a head-on shot. Waiting until after the turn is easier.
You can blame Hollywood, movies drastically overstate the accuracy and effectiveness of handguns, and drastically understate the accuracy and effectiveness of rifles.
There are those who think Connally might have been his original/intended target and that JFK was more a target of opportunity.
(The short form of the theory is that Oswald thought Connally, as Secretary of the Navy, was responsible for denying his application to have his dishonorable discharge overturned. It hangs together as well as any specific theory about why he might have chosen to go after JFK, and fit more closely with his attempt to kill General Walker the year before.)
That and the moving car disrupts the accuracy of the shot. (Making it too high or too low by the millisecond) By shooting when he actually did, it is a very steady target simply moving away at slow speed. I’m sure Oswald went up to the 6th floor prior to the actual shooting and considered this.