Except for the 20 witnesses who said they heard other shots and all the other evidence. What that evidence means are facts. How people interpret those facts is up to them. It’s called disagreement. You discount all of those people and their explanations and interpretations. That isn’t reasonable at all. That is up to you, minority interpretations are allowed.
Don’t forget MK Ultra. And the Tuskegee Airmen - were their whereabouts all accounted for? I think not.
I mean, how could a lone gunman kill the President of the United States, right out in the open? Who’s going to believe the official explanation when there are so many others? They keep telling us the same stuff, and there’s got to be a reason.
So when someone shoots the President from cover, and political assassinations are not from cover, has connections to two spy agencies and Cuba, says he is a patsy, 20 witnesses say there were shots from another location, witnesses say they were asked to change their story and the lead suspect is shot before he can explain why he is a patsy, you are not even the slightest bit suspicious? Okay then. I say we cannot know. You say we can know with certainty that Oswald was a lone nut. I don’t think that is reasonable. You cannot know under the overall facts, just as I cannot be certain of something unproven. If you think such conspiracies do not happen and absolutely did not, then okay. Is it possible for a lone gunman to kill the president? Sure. It happened to Garfield and McKinley. Lone attempts were made on Ford and others. But conspiratorial attempts were made against FDR and Truman. Lincoln was assassinated as part of a conspiracy. The jolly little notion that this cannot happen in the United States is b.s.
Would you care to expound upon this axiom? I’ve never heard it before, and it really does sound quite special.
Ah, there it is. I’ve found that usually when spittle-flecked extremists and/or conspiracy theorists really get going in a conversation, they reveal the reason they’re so oddly vehement is that they’re *raging against a proposition that nobody else has put forward *-- except for themselves, in their own minds.
Who said it could not happen? The issue is did it happen in this case. Well, it didn’t, and you’ve got nothing to sway the pendulum from the evidence proving that to the conspiracy theory.
You implied that it could not happen when you said mocked all the people who don’t accept it was a lone gunman by assuming that you know that they have hurt feelings by it. Oh, and the spittle flecked stuff is very rich.
And it isn’t an issue. It started out as a GQ asking why people thought what they did.
I believe Robert Heinlein or Johnathan Swift said that first.
It was Dr. Fidelius, and nothing you can possibly say will ever convince me otherwise. Stamps foot
The Second Stone, I was persuaded for decades that Kennedy must have been shot (the head shot, that is) from a vantange point in front of and off to Kennedy’s right. I was convinced of this solely because of the way Kennedy’s head and body moved following the head shot, where his head is driven upwardly and back to his left and his left shoulder up and over the boot of the convertible top. This thread is what finally disabused me of that notion and proved to my satisfaction that the head shot came from the school book depository window.
Basically, two points were raised, one which I would already have known if I had thought about it, and the second by a Discovery Channel recreation in which shots were fired from all of the points where conspiracy theorists believed they had been fired from. The first point, which I would have realized had I thought about it, is that bullets simply don’t have the mass to drive a body in the way Kennedy’s body moved following the head shot. I’ve long known that when people get shot they don’t get knocked backward like in Hollywood movies. The bullet just passes through them with no noticable movement on their part. I’ve seen videos from time to time where people have been shot by the police and their bodies don’t get knocked around either; instead they just crumple where they are.
The second point was none of the shots fired from any other vantage point produced a spray of blood in the direction that Kennedy’s blood spray occurred, and none of the shots from the other vantage points produced blood and tissue spatter in the automobile that even came close to what happened when Kennedy was killed. The only shots that replicated what was known to have happened that day were shots fired from the school book depository.
As for the reason Kennedy’s body did move like it did, it was driven up, back and to the left by a “jet effect” created by Kennedy’s head in effect exploding in the opposite direction after having been hit by a bullet coming from the direction of the school book depository. BJMoose explained this phenomenon here, and the calculations he referred to which explain jet effect in detail are cited in bonzer’s post here.
The result is that I no longer believe Kennedy was shot from in front and to his right.
I had also seen photos years ago of the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat and the entry wound between between his shoulder blades and felt that this shot must have come from ground level because both wounds seemed to be on a level plane, but Shodan dispelled this notion in post #49 of that thread by posting a link showing that not only are the two wounds not on a level plane but that the degree they are off corresponds again to a bullet coming from the school book depository. That link can be found here.
Now, none of this proves that Oswald was the shooter (I’ve seen it posed that Oswald was in the building but chickened out and that Kennedy was actually shot by a backup shooter, thus his claim that he had been set up), and none of it proves that there wasn’t some sort of conspiracy involved in Kennedy’s assassination, but it does prove that that bullets were not being fired from the grassy knoll or anywhere but the book depository.
And again, thanks to BJMoose, bonzer and Shodan for disabusing me at long last of the belief that Kennedy had been shot from vantage points other than the school book depository.
I thought Posner put all this to rest.
You haven’t established that political assassination is never from cover. Here is a hint - no, it isn’t.
Plus, if political assassinations are always from somebody walking up and taking a shot, as in the cases of Reagan, McKinley et al., then why wasn’t Kennedy assassinated by someone walking up and taking a shot?
You do realize, do you not, that Oswald made an earlier attempt at a political assassination, also from cover, against a right-wing general he also hated from afar?
“Has connections to” is rather vague. I have connections to the CIA as well - they interviewed me once. But I haven’t shot any Presidents. And don’t you think that Oswald’s pro-Cuban sympathies are a reason why he is guilty, not innocent? All that Cuban missile crisis unpleasantness might cause someone unstable and anti-American to do something rash.
He didn’t confess on camera, that’s true. On the other hand, I wouldn’t necessarily take everything he said as Gospel.
I would be very suspicious. I would appoint a commission to investigate the evidence, and make a determination based on the facts as best can be established.
I would pay rather more attention to the physical evidence, however, given what we know about echoes and the uncertainty of eyewitness testimony. And there doesn’t seem to be any physical evidence of any shots fired from anywhere besides the Texas School Book Depository.
That is an interesting way of putting it. All the facts are on one side, and your side is “unproven”. But you don’t think it is reasonable to decide in favor of the side with all the facts.
As mentioned, no one has said that this can’t happen in the US. It did happen, therefore it is possible.
Regards,
Shodan
There is also a more recent, but failed example:
More on the second one (which I just learned of via your link) – wow, now that was one stealthy assassin. And he got away with it!
Not to mention Penn & Teller.
As noted previously, no one has said that a complex assassination conspiracy cannot happen in the U.S.
What I find extremely unlikely is the following scenario (which goes beyond assassinations to other alleged conspiracy plots like those espoused by 9/11 Truthers):
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The government is charged with engaging in a complex dastardly plot for shadowy reasons, employing large numbers of people for the commission and coverup of the deed.
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No one squeals at the time or over the course of many years following the event.
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Conspiracy theorists devise various explanations of what they think really happened.
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An extensive official investigation of the charges yields a reasonable and evidence-based conclusion that debunks the conspiracy claims.
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Conspiracy theorists toil on for decades, ultimately to be vindicated when the plot is exposed with compelling evidence, and get to say “I told you so!!!”.
This scenario has never occurred in the U.S. That’s not to say that it’s impossible for such a thing to happen, but element #5 has always been lacking (the vindication part). If compelling evidence is brought forward regarding J.F.K. or 9/11 or whatever, I’ll be happy to reexamine my beliefs.
Till then, you got zippo.
Out of curiosity, do you have any explanation for why the gunmen firing from the grassy knoll missed all their shots? (Since the autopsy and the 1977 review of the xrays and photos taken at the autopsy both concluded that JFK was shot from above and behind.)
Given the potential for echoes and the limitations of the human ear, I don’t find this disagreement to be all that compelling. Now if there were people who saw a shooter on the grassy knoll (and CTers like to put this hypothetical shooter less than 20 feet from people who were known to be on or near the knoll at the time), I’d consider that more useful evidence.
By this line of reasoning, any theory of the crime is viable and nothing can ever be ruled out because counter-evidence can be written off as a mere difference of opinion. I could theorize that Kennedy was killed by Martian death-rays and anyone who shows me a picture of his blown-open skull (suggesting a physical impact, as by a bullet) is infringing on my right to hold my own opinion.
Who knows if Oswald acted alone. There could have been a “handler” that encouraged him. But the idea that he did not shoot Kennedy is just loony. We have a picture of him with the gun, we know he bought the gun mail order, his wife knew he had the gun, he was seen carrying a long package on the bus and into the building, he worked where the shots came from, the bullets matched the rifle, the window had a line of sight to the limo, witnesses said the shots came from the building, the gun was found in the building, Oswald fled the building and shot a policeman, and so on and so on.
Oswald?
I thought that Woody Harrelson’s dad did it. No?
I always had a shred of doubt until I actually visited the Sixth Floor Museum. The actual site of Oswald’s “sniper’s nest” is blocked off, but you can look out the window that is two positions down from where he fired.
His position was absolutely perfect. Given the angle of the turn that JFK’s car had made and the curve in the road, Oswald had a perfectly straight line shot. My grandmother could have made that shot. And when you look from the grassy knoll, it becomes painfully obvious that the only way someone could have fired from there and hit JFK was with a bazooka.
Oswald did it, period.