I had exactly that reaction on visiting the 6th Floor Museum. In fact the surprising part is that there were so many shots for so few good hits. A slow moving target, going directly away from the shooter at short range is not a serious challenge. It's fortunate that anyone in the Lincoln survived.
Moderated JFK conspiracy theories: it never ends III
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I had exactly that reaction on visiting the 6th Floor Museum. In fact the surprising part is that there were so many shots for so few good hits. A slow moving target, going directly away from the shooter at short range is not a serious challenge. It's fortunate that anyone in the Lincoln survived.
Tomtomkent
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Never visited the site, but very much the impression I have had, and something the likes of Robert Prey never seemed to figure: we only have evidence for three shots and the likely reality is that Gov. Connelly was wrong about being shot by a fourth, as his wounds and reactions pair to the third that struck JFK. But if he was right, that STILL would not mean a conspiracy. It is perfectly reasonable for Oswald to have got a fourth shot out and hit the car an extra time.
As far as I know Oswald only had 4 cartridges for his rifle the day he shot JFK. Three empty pieces of brass were found on the floor and the police unloaded a single round from the rifle after they found it. I can't remember if the clip was still in the rifle when they found it. The 6.5mm Carcano he used normally drops the clip when the last round is chambered, but sometimes they stick in place.
Ranb
turingtest
Mistral, mistral wind...
You ought to read JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness, by Jean Hill. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats.
I Ratant
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.
The internal finishing of the clip well is rough on the Carcano, and an empty clip weighs very little. On mine, it would stick in the well until the next one was inserted.
The clip in Oswald's rifle was partially out when the rifle was carried from the TSBD.
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pgwenthold
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"Why did Oswald take three shots?"
"Because that's how many it took before he hit the target"
What? You thought he was trying to hit Kennedy in the lower neck? He missed twice. Hit the target on the third shot and then stopped.
HSienzant
Philosopher
I think you're guilty of believing conspiracy woo.
Governor Connally said he heard two shots... one before he was hit and one after. He said he presumed he never heard the shot that hit him. He never said anything about a fourth shot.
His Warren Commission testimony: http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/conn_j.htm
His House Select Committee on Assassinations testimony:
http://jfkassassination.net/russ/m_j_russ/hscacon.htm
This excerpt from his WC testimony says it well:
== quote ==
Mr. SPECTER. As the automobile turned left onto Elm from Houston, what did occur there, Governor?
Governor CONNALLY. We had--we had gone, I guess, 150 feet, maybe 200 feet, I don't recall how far it was, heading down to get on the freeway, the Stemmons Freeway, to go out to the hall where we were going to have lunch and, as I say, the crowds had begun to thin, and we could--I was anticipating that we were going to be at the hall in approximately 5 minutes from the time we turned on Elm Street.
We had just made the turn, well, when I heard what I thought was a shot. I heard this noise which I immediately took to be a rifle shot. I instinctively turned to my right because the sound appeared to come from over my right
shoulder, so I turned to look back over my right shoulder, and I saw nothing unusual except just people in the crowd, but I did not catch the President in the corner of my eye, and I was interested, because once I heard the shot in my own mind I identified it as a rifle shot, and I immediately--the only thought that crossed my mind was that this is an assassination attempt.
So I looked, failing to see him, I was turning to look back over my left shoulder into the back seat, but I never got that far in my turn. I got about in the position I am in now facing you, looking a little bit to the left of center, and then I felt like someone had hit me in the back.
Mr. SPECTER. What is the best estimate that you have as to the time span between the sound of the first shot and the feeling of someone hitting you in the back which you just described?
Governor CONNALLY. A very, very brief span of time. Again my trend of thought just happened to be, I suppose along this line, I immediately thought that this--that I had been shot. I knew it when I just looked down and I was covered with blood, and the thought immediately passed through my mind that there were either two or three people involved or more in this or someone was shooting with an automatic rifle. These were just thoughts that went through my mind because of the rapidity of these two, of the first shot plus the blow that I took, and I knew I had been hit, and I immediately assumed, because of the amount of blood, and in fact, that it had obviously passed through my chest. that I had probably been fatally hit.
So I merely doubled up, and then turned to my right again and began to--I just sat there, and Mrs. Connally pulled me over to her lap. She was sitting, of course, on the jump seat, so I reclined with my head in her lap, conscious all the time, and with my eyes open; and then, of course, the third shot sounded, and I heard the shot very clearly. I heard it hit him. I heard the shot hit something, and I assumed again--it never entered my mind that it ever hit anybody but the President. I heard it hit. It was a very loud noise, just that audible, very clear.
Immediately I could see on my clothes, my clothing, I could see on the interior of the car which, as I recall, was a pale blue, brain tissue, which I immediately recognized, and I recall very well, on my trousers there was one chunk of brain tissue as big as almost my thumb, thumbnail, and again I did not see the President at any time either after the first, second, or third shots, but I assumed always that it was he who was hit and no one else.
I immediately, when I was hit, I said, "Oh, no, no, no." And then I said, "My God, they are going to kill us all." Nellie, when she pulled me over into her lap----
Mr. SPECTER. Nellie is Mrs. Connally?
Governor CONNALLY. Mrs. Connally. When she pulled me over into her lap, she could tell I was still breathing and moving, and she said, "Don't worry, Be quiet. You are going to be all right." She Just kept telling me I was going to be all right.
After the third shot, and I heard Roy Kellerman tell the driver, "Bill, get out of line." And then I saw him move, and I assumed he was moving a button or something on the panel of the automobile, and he said, "Get us to a hospital quick." I assumed he was saying this to the patrolman, the motorcycle police who were leading us.
At about that time, we began to pull out of the cavalcade, out of the line, and I lost consciousness and didn't regain consciousness until we got to the hospital.
. . .
Governor, you have described hearing a first shot and a third shot. Did you hear a second shot?
Governor CONNALLY. No; I did not.
Mr. SPECTER. What is your best estimate as to the timespan between the first shot which you heard and the shot which you heretofore characterized as the third shot?
Governor CONNALLY. It was a very brief span of time; oh, I would have to say a matter of seconds. I don't know, 10, 12 seconds. It was extremely rapid, so much so that again I thought that whoever was firing must be firing with an automatic rifle because of the rapidity of the shots; a very short period of time.
Mr. SPECTER. What was your impression then as to the source of the shot?
Governor CONNALLY. From back over my right shoulder which, again, was where immediately when I heard the first shot I identified the sound as coming back over my right-shoulder.
Mr. SPECTER. At an elevation?
Governor CONNALLY. At an elevation. I would have guessed at an elevation.
== unquote ==
And from the HSCA:
== quote ==
Mr. SAWYER. Governor and Mrs. Connally I recognize that you probably don't view yourselves as a ballistics expert, by any means, but I assume you have done some hunting and you are familiar with firearms, from the way you talk?
Mr. CONNALLY. Yes, I have done a great deal.
Mr. SAWYER. So we are not talking to someone totally inexperienced when we are talking about whether or not you can identify a rifle shot?
Mr. CONNALLY. No, sir, I have shot a rifle all my life and have done a great deal of hunting.
Mr. SAWYER. I suppose, too, that--I have just been thinking since I heard your testimony and I am sure you have thought about it, many, many more times, and without either being a medical expert or a ballistic expert, I presume it is reasonable to assume that with a Mannlicher/Carcano traveling at least twice the speed of sound, the projectile must be 2,200 feet per second, or more, I assume, that the bullet would reach you before the sound would reach you, and with that kind of an impact on your nervous system, whether conscious or not, you probably wouldn't have registered the sound, if there was one, of the bullet that hit you?
Mrs. CONNALLY. I think that is precisely what happened, Congressman, no question about it. That is why I don't think there is anyway the first bullet hit me. I heard that sound. And I had not been hit, I heard the first rifle shot, and I did not hear, was not conscious of the shot that hit me, and obviously the bullet reached me before the sound did. So the shock of the hit that I took, I was just totally unconscious of the sound, yet by the third shot, when Mrs. Connally pulled me down in her lap, I was awake, my eyes were open, I heard the shot fired, I heard it hit, and I saw the results, very clearly and you know--you have a lot of expert testimony, and I am delighted with the work of this committee, because hopefully we can clear up some of the speculation and the questions that have been asked over the years, but let me assure you that we may be wrong in what we say, we may be wrong in our impression, we may be wrong when asked precise questions about time, whether it is 2 seconds or 10 seconds under those circumstances I can't say with certainty the precise second that things happen, but the things that we do remember, and the things that we are testifying to here today, Congressman, are as indelibly etched in our minds as anything could ever be, and I will merely ask you to give yourselves the test, ask any adult person, over the age of 30, in this country, or over the age of 35 we will say, where they were when they first heard the news of the assassination. They can tell you where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with. I have not asked one human being in the world, not anywhere in the world, that hasn't been able to tell me where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with at the time they first heard the news.
The only point I am making is that there are certain impacts on human consciousness, on the human mind, that are indelibly etched there, now, and these things are engraved in our minds, beyond any doubt.
I can't, I am not going to argue with a ballistic expert or acoustics expert about the precise time or the frame of the Zapruder films, I can't tell you precisely whether it is frame 231 or 234, when the first evidence shows that I am reacting to the shot, but what we are saying to you, the things that we say to you with certain definiteness, it is because we are absolutely sure, at least in our own minds, that that is what happened and that is what we remember.
Mr. SAWYER. I want to join the rest of my colleagues in expressing our appreciation to you, Governor and Mrs. Connally, for coming up, and I want to compliment you on the obvious frankness touched with a little humor, as best you can in this kind of situation, and your warmth coming across, I appreciate it very much. It kind of gave me a perspective on this that somebody there can only give. You got across as good a communication of it, at least to me, as I have heard.
== unquote ==
There is no evidence of a fourth shot from Oswald's rifle. As noted by another poster, after the assassination, at the sniper's nest window in the Depository, three spent shells were found. They were all ballistically-traceable to Oswald's weapon, also found on the sixth floor. That rifle held one unfired bullet, meaning Oswald started the assassination attempt with just four bullets and fired three.
And it's important to note that the vast majority of eyewitnesses, by almost all accountings, said they heard three shots and only three shots. More witnesses said they heard fewer than three than heard more than three, in fact.
Three shots were fired. All from Oswald's rifle. Those are two of the absolutes we know with certainty (along with death and taxes).
Hank
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Tomtomkent
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Not a personal belief at all, and happy to clarify. My point was that even if the conspiracy woo often banded about was correct (clearly it is not as you just demonstrated so well) that woo would still be well in the bounds of what a lone nutter could achieve and not require a second shooter.
The difficulty of the shots, and the speed required is often presented as near superhuman. Neither is accurate, and the additional layers of difficulty most prominent CT advocates pile onto the shots still remains... Possible. Plausible in fact. A lot easier than the alternate explanations in many cases.
Edit: just seen what I typed about connelly believing there was a fourth shot and reread the testimony. Can see why I was an idiot unable to count. My bad.
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turingtest
Mistral, mistral wind...
Which is the main point, I think. Your average CTists snorts at the idea of Oswald firing some shots with a rifle he was known to have from a location he was known to be in- "pffft! Not likely!"- and then goes on to present a presumably more plausible scenario (which can't even be dignified with the word "theory") that, instead, the real shooter was on the knoll, where he could be easily seen, firing a rifle that emitted smoke (making him even more easily detectable), and Oswald, in a place he couldn't be so easily seen, firing a smokeless rifle, was just a patsy that was supposed to be quickly found and framed.
You have to wonder, sometimes, if CTists even know what the word "plausible" means; they certainly seem unwilling to apply it as a standard to their own ideas, when they can only counter what they misunderstand (or misrepresent) as "fiction" with even more outlandish fictions. Of course, since what they're pleased to call "theories" aren't actually any such thing, they're not bound by the need for any evidence for them; they're free to make it all up as they go along.
Willy Ekerslike
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Only sometimes?!
This is what amazed me when I went to Dallas, the shot was so simple and Dealey Plaza is so small. Also, there is nowhere on the grassy knoll or behind the picket fence where you could stand with a rifle and not stick out like a sore thumb.
The shot from the front also seemed harder to me as you are having to lead your target as it crosses and falls away in front of you. From the 6th floor it is a straight shot as the way the road falls away from you reduces the apparent motion of the car. When I was there in 1997 the Limousine that drives people through Dealey Plaza went by a couple of times (it basically travels at about the speed of the motorcade) so I was able to get a very clear and eery view of what the target would have looked like.
Any remaining doubt I had that there may have been a shooter from the front left me after I visited the site.
And yes for many years I had doubts about the "official" story as did every one I knew who had been alive at the time. The US President had been assassinated, his alleged killer murdered whilst in police custody, there were conflicting stories about the number of shots etc from early on and when the Zapruder film became public in the low res form we first saw it in it certainly looked to lay people used to Hollywood portrayals of shootings that there had been a shot from the front.
I also remember the Warren Commissions guess as to the order of shots (hit, miss, hit - if I recall correctly), did tighten the time frame for the shots. The later analysis of miss, hit, hit made more sense. I may have this bit all wrong, but that is what my memory is telling me - if I am wrong please let me know.
mikegriffith1
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One of the many pieces of hard, physical evidence of conspiracy in the JFK assassination is the dented shell (CE 543), one of the shells so conveniently found right next to the "sniper's window." (Odd: The gunman hid his rifle but left his rifle shells in plain view right by the window!)
That shell, CE 543, could not have been fired from the alleged murder rifle, and it could not have held a bullet in it. Dr. Michael Kurtz explains:
I discuss this in more detail in The Dented Shell: Hard Evidence of Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination.
That shell, CE 543, could not have been fired from the alleged murder rifle, and it could not have held a bullet in it. Dr. Michael Kurtz explains:
The third cartridge case, Commission Exhibit 543, contained a dent in the opening so large that it could not have held a bullet in it. . . .
In a letter to the Warren Commission of 2 June 1964, J. Edgar Hoover noted that Commission Exhibit 543 (FBI Number C6), the case with the dent, had "three sets of marks on the base of this cartridge case which were not found [on the other casings]." The case, according to Hoover, had also been loaded into and extracted from a weapon three times. The only marks linking the case to Oswald's rifle were marks from the magazine follower. As noted above, Case 543 could not have obtained the marks from the magazine follower on 22 November, since the last round in the clip must have been the unfired one in the chamber. Furthermore, Commission Exhibit 543 lacks the characteristic indentation on the side made by the firing chamber of Oswald's rifle.
Dr. E. Forrest Chapman, forensic pathologist, who in 1973 was given access to the assassination materials in the National Archives, noted that Case 543 was probably "dry loaded" into a rifle. Since the dent was too large for the case to have contained a bullet on 22 November, it was never fired from Oswald's rifle. The empty case, however, for some unknown reason cold have been loaded into a rifle, the trigger pulled, and the bolt operated. Dr. Chapman discovered this phenomenon through experiments of his own.
Dr. Chapman also noted that Case 543 had a deeper and more concave indentation on its base, at the primer, where the firing pin strikes the case. Only empty cases exhibit such characteristics. The FBI also reproduced the effect. Commission Exhibit 557 is a test cartridge case, fired empty from Oswald's rifle by the FBI for ballistics comparison purposes. It, too, contains the dent in the lip and deep primer impression similar to Case 543.
Thus, the evidence proves conclusively that Commission Exhibit 543 could not have been fired from Oswald's rifle. . . . (Crime of the Century, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982, pp. 50-51, emphasis added)
In a letter to the Warren Commission of 2 June 1964, J. Edgar Hoover noted that Commission Exhibit 543 (FBI Number C6), the case with the dent, had "three sets of marks on the base of this cartridge case which were not found [on the other casings]." The case, according to Hoover, had also been loaded into and extracted from a weapon three times. The only marks linking the case to Oswald's rifle were marks from the magazine follower. As noted above, Case 543 could not have obtained the marks from the magazine follower on 22 November, since the last round in the clip must have been the unfired one in the chamber. Furthermore, Commission Exhibit 543 lacks the characteristic indentation on the side made by the firing chamber of Oswald's rifle.
Dr. E. Forrest Chapman, forensic pathologist, who in 1973 was given access to the assassination materials in the National Archives, noted that Case 543 was probably "dry loaded" into a rifle. Since the dent was too large for the case to have contained a bullet on 22 November, it was never fired from Oswald's rifle. The empty case, however, for some unknown reason cold have been loaded into a rifle, the trigger pulled, and the bolt operated. Dr. Chapman discovered this phenomenon through experiments of his own.
Dr. Chapman also noted that Case 543 had a deeper and more concave indentation on its base, at the primer, where the firing pin strikes the case. Only empty cases exhibit such characteristics. The FBI also reproduced the effect. Commission Exhibit 557 is a test cartridge case, fired empty from Oswald's rifle by the FBI for ballistics comparison purposes. It, too, contains the dent in the lip and deep primer impression similar to Case 543.
Thus, the evidence proves conclusively that Commission Exhibit 543 could not have been fired from Oswald's rifle. . . . (Crime of the Century, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982, pp. 50-51, emphasis added)
I discuss this in more detail in The Dented Shell: Hard Evidence of Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Shill.
Belz...
Fiend God
Yes, odd how the gun he was holding in his hands was easier to try and hide than the shell casings which were scattered around on the ground...
Dear oh dear.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
To a conspiracy theorist, there are no coincidences.
Yeah, what are the chances shell casings would be found where the rifle ejected them?
Border Reiver
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You've overlooked at least two problems with your analysis of a single rifle casing:
a. your "experts" are comparing the Exhibit to casings removed from other weapons at different times - how does Ex 543 compare with the other two casings for extractor marks, dents, depth and size of the firing pin strike?; and
b. This round nto having been the last round in the clip on Nov 22, 1963 does not precluded it from having been the last round in the clip at an earlier time - say, a dry firing of the rifle that took place prior to that date.
And of course there is the problem that LHO was alone there at that time, given that no other employee noted anyone else coming in or out, etc.
Axxman300
Philosopher
They weren't in plain view, Oswald had moved a stack of boxes to conceal the area.
*speculation* Oswald was a Marine, and likely took his rifle with him to cover his escape from the floor. Had someone rushed in while he was moving out they would have been shot too. I can say this because he later shot Tippet while attempting his escape.
Hiding the weapon was key to escaping the building. This is not rocket science.
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