Now, I love talking about the death of John F. Kennedy...

I love reminding myself what a rotten sonofabitch Lyndon Johnson was.

I love talking about firearms as well, so this is doubly serendipitous...

This event is far from current (it happened nearly 41 years ago) but it does still affect us...

I've read some articles showing how Oswald "could" have fired all the shots that were fired at Connally and Kennedy, as well as the fragment that hit the guy at the underpass. Well, I can actually disprove that Oswald fired all, or even three of the shots.

Here is a link describing the arm Oswald is supposed to have used to kill Kennedy. It's known commonly (and incorrectly) as the Mannlicher Carcano rifle. It's more appropriate to call it the Paravaccini Carcano rifle. Now, in order for a rifle to be reloaded, a cartridge must be made available to the action to load it. There are various means of doing this. The most common is to have external magazines (commonly, and irritatingly called 'clips') to load into the rifle's magazine well, a cut in the body of the rifle especially put for receiving such a feeder. Before that internal box magazines existed. The Mauser Gewehr 98 uses a double-stacked internal box. Then there's rifles like the US M-1 Garand, which use En-Bloc clip loaders. It's basically two pieces of sheet steel with a third piece as a back. You shove the thing into a very minimal internal magazine, and it loads and fires each shot properly.

The Paravaccini rifle loads in this manner.

There are actually two ways to load it, either insert a full En-Bloc, which in the Paravaccini's case holds six rounds, or insert an individual round manually after each shot. Without the En-Bloc, you have to load the rounds as you fire it.

The key hook in Oswald's case? No En-Bloc was ever found...If he fired the three shots at Kennedy, he fired them as he loaded them.

Something like this.

fire, rotate bolt, pull back, insert new round, push bolt in, rotate bolt, fire, rotate bolt, pull back, insert new round, push bolt in, rotate bolt, fire...

That's if there's three shots, and all that has to happen in 5.6 seconds.

Eyewitnesses report that the first two shots came right on top of eachother...

However, as the Zapruder film clearly establishes, there's at least four shots. Five if you want to count the guy who was hit at the underpass.

3 is definitely out of the question already, but four, or even five? Ladies and gentlemen, without a doubt, Oswald, even if a participant, was not the only one. Then let's consider that there were no fingerprints on the rifle, until after Oswald died, and that nitrate tests performed on Oswald indicated he hadn't fired a weapon of that sort recently. What does that tell us? Oswald didn't kill Kennedy.

Before anyone asks about Officer Tippett, whom Oswald is supposed to have killed, no eye witness ever testified that he did it...There's no proof he was even at the scene of that crime.

Now, with no name to give to the Cops about Oswald at the theatre, why did the cops show up in numbers sufficient to lock down the whole street? As far as they should have known, it was just some random jackass who doesn't want to pay to get into a movie.

Finally, why were no records kept of the interrogation conducted on Oswald? Certainly the police officer who conducted would have known that it was inadmissable in court...

I now open the floor.

It was the magic bullet -- it only took one bullet that zigged and zagged a bit, didn't you know that?

What if the en bloc simply wasn't found? That doesn't mean it didn't exist. If it was anything like the M1 Garand in function, the metal bits of the en block could have been expelled a few feet away, and then kicked around or overlooked. The en block could have gone out the window in fact.

Kennedy's assassination was a coverup. Whether it was a coverup of a conspiracy or a coverup of the fact that the full truth couldn't be found out, I leave that question to the real truth-seekers on the subject. I believe you have just scratched the surface, though. I know some Kennedy assassination buffs, and there are hundreds more factors to talk about.

Because Oswald was a fromer Marine.
He was a well enough marksmen, but did not cut sniper training.
He was diagnosed with a mental disorder. (Couldn't take the SGTs heat).
He was a very versatile weapons master.
He actually spent extra time trying to perfect his marksmenship to impress his SGT.
There is no doubt he was capable to make 1 shot a second with that rifle, for upto 6 seconds.

But, all in all. Who really knows?

The En-Bloc ejection system on a rifle like the Paravaccini Carcano works very differently from the M-1, not being gas operated, the system doesn't operate with nearly as much force, and the En-Bloc doesn't get kicked around.

Felix, it's physically impossible to operate a Paravaccini Carcano rifle at one shot a second, 3 shots in 5.6 seconds, with an En-Bloc clip is a hell of a stretch, but if he loaded the rounds individually (which he must have) we're talking out of the ballpark impossible. Besides, it's nigh-on impossible to operate most semi-automatics at any reasonable accuracy (let alone perfect, 100% head-popping accuracy, as in the case of Port Arthur, which makes the case against Bryant kinda ridiculous) at greater than one shot a second, which the Zapruder film clearly establishes.

C'mon you guys - everyone knows it was aliens that did it. Those Venusians have had it in for the Democrats from day 1 :D .

That or it was the Mafia...

They had it in for Kennedy ever since he came out of the closet...About being Irish...

I am a uh son of Erin!

I liked Kennedy. Was an awful thing what happened to America that day...

Training and perfection.
How long does it take a recruit to disassemble his M16? With foloow me instructions, 5-6 minutes.

How long does it take a seasoned soldier to disassemble his M16? Less than 1 minute.

Blindfolded you ask, average is 90 seconds.
Why? Training and perfection.

To proerly maintain sight position, and remain with-in sight aperture, the left hand holds the weapon steady, whilst the right rapidly runs the bolt, and cocking/safety feature (weapon dependent) reloaded and back on target in .5-.75 seconds. The exhale comes after round out, and inhale when eye is back on sight. That's 1 shot a second on a bolt action, with forced breathing.

Was not some of these weapons redesigned with the built in magazine well? As well as some being rechambered for different calibers?

I can only comment on training, and marksmenship. My limited knowledge of this weapon is just that!

Never argue with Felix about guns :D

Actually, there was a second gunman who did it - a future version of John F. Kennedy from a parallel universe who didn't get assassinated, because the Red Dwarf crew accidently killed Lee Harvey Oswald when they travelled back in time in their search for curry, as they had run out of supplies 3 million years into the future. The Kennedy who survived however had driven the country into the ground because of one (mafia-boss married) mistress too many and ended up in prison (the mafia-blackmailed J. Edgar Hoover became president in 1965), and the USSR had won both the arms and the space race, resulting in all major US cities being evacuated out of fear for nuclear attacks; and the future from which the Red Dwarf crew came ceased to exist in effect. Because stopping their past selves from killing Oswald only worked by driving him to a different floor of the building from which Oswald was unable to actually kill the president (because of the angle), the Red Dwarf Crew had to figure out a different way to restore history and make sure Kennedy was assassinated properly, figuring you'd have a clear shot from behind the grassy knoll across the street; none of them however had a taste for pulling the trigger, so they went forward in time, saved John F. Kennedy from prison, explaining his role as a martyr in history, and dropped him with a sniper rifle behind the grassy knoll. So in effect, the real assassin of John F. Kennedy was, erm, John F. Kennedy. ;)

God, I loved that show.

[ 11-20-2004, 06:03 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

A secret US security force (under the command of the real president) killed Kennedy because of embarrassing concessions made to the Soviet union over all that Cuban missle bollocks, and because he repeatedly risked starting a nuclear war. (If the assassination attempts on Castro had succeeded, there may have been nuclear war. Before WWI, two super-powers built up their armies, thinking that the risk of a hugely destructive war would be an effective deterent. There is no reason to assume that the same plan which failed to prevent WWI would prevent WWIII).
However, there was only one gunman involved in the Kennedy assassination. No secret organisation would employ two gunmen, risking exposure if both were caught, when one could do the job. The second gunman theory was invented by the same organisation that employed Oswald to kill Kennedy.