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.