Campfire chatting....Lee Harvey Oswald and the Carcano rifle...

[Dog Soldier]

And the car was going away from him. Nice easy shots from the rear. I'm kind of amazed Oswald missed the first one!



Yes, solid as a rock. Little kick from them. Totally 100 percent reliable. But I sure would not like getting into a shootout with GIs who have M1s or Tommys with Sten Guns and all I have is that .380!

Deaf

Hey Deaf, Those were personal protection pistols for officers. They were not offensive weapons. Our American Officers carried Colt 1903 .380 pistols.

 

[Phaedrus/69]

I wasn't born yet when President Kennedy was murdered. Looking at the relevant measurements and stats it's clear that the shots wouldn't have been difficult to pull off for a competent shooter. As for the conspiracies, I think that's human nature. People tend to be superstitious and not like coincidences. It does seem very convenient (to the conspiratorially minded) that the killer was himself killed before he could say much, and that he too died. It was certainly a different time but it wasn't too many years later that we got the Watergate break ins and the resignation of President Nixon. The US sort of lost its innocence and our faith in our leaders. Given the stuff we have seen nowadays it's certainly not hard to imagine some spooks in the CIA having a President killed. To be clear I'm not endorsing that view, just saying that it's hard to rule out anything now, given how deep the rot seems to run. FOIA releases have shown some shocking stuff by the govt in the past.

 

[JohnKSa]

To be clear I'm not endorsing that view, just saying that it's hard to rule out anything now, given how deep the rot seems to run.

At one point I became very interested in the topic and read/watched everything I could find about it. For awhile I had maybe 30-40 books on the subject and had read probably that many more besides. I don't know how many documentaries I watched. I still have a copy of the Zapruder film around somewhere.

I started out with the thought that my knowledge of firearms and my experience with them would give me a significant edge in cutting through some of the confusion and maybe helping point towards proof of a conspiracy.

I finally assembled enough of a library and enough information that I could start tracing back allegations and claims to their sources. I could actually find good solid facts where they existed and discount allegations and claims that couldn't be sourced. That's when things started unraveling. Every single juicy piece of "evidence" was either easily discredited (like the claims that the shots were impossible), could be traced back to a source that wasn't credible, or could be traced back to a source that made the claim without attempting to support it. I found out a lot about Jim Garrison who was likely insane and who provided a huge amount of the conspiracy lore out of his own tortured brain. Oliver Stone's movie was based largely on Jim Garrison's deranged ramblings and watching it is as useful to understanding the subject as watching The Matrix is useful to understanding the laws of physics.

So what was the result? I still don't know what happened because it's not possible to say for certain. But here is what I do know.

I know that a lot of what people believe to be hard facts in this case are absolute bunk.

I know that I was unable to find a single piece of credible evidence that proved, or even strongly implicated that LHO did not shoot JFK, that LHO worked with accomplices, or that LHO was either knowingly or unwittingly part of a conspiracy.

I can't prove that LHO acted alone or that he shot JFK, but I can say that all the credible evidence I found points in that direction and none of it points in any another direction.

I did come to one very solid conclusion: It only takes one crackpot a few seconds to propose a theory and make up some supporting evidence. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to disprove a theory and disprove the supporting "evidence"...

 

[Deaf Smith]

Hey Deaf, Those were personal protection pistols for officers. They were not offensive weapons. Our American Officers carried Colt 1903 .380 pistols.

I considered them a 'badge of rank' pistol, like our generals carrying the Colt 1903. Now the P-35 and 1911, those were fight'en pistols! Not sure if Italian sergente pack a pistol, but no doubt their Aspirante and above did. But sadly it was just a .380....

My RAAF S&W .38/200 and my Italian 1934! Note those grips for the S&W. That's real silver New Guinea sixpences and shillings (and one Australian sixpence. All dated before or during WW2.)

Deaf

 

[Dog Soldier]

I like the .380 caliber pistols. My .380 is a Colt Mustang Plus II. With the new loadings they are impressive.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

"It was not a German Mauser...."

Actually at that time, the Argentine Mauser 1891 was a common mail order item (I remember seeing a lot of ads) and easily mistaken for a Carcano. I walked into the J&M Wholesale one day and saw a rack of what I thought were Carcanos and was corrected that they were 7.65 Argentine Mauser cavalry carbines.

photos from Wikimedia, released under Creative Commons.

"Ending mail order sales was to end gun violence?"
Oswald's mail order buys were traced within 24 hours. If he'd walked into Sears with cash, he could have bought a hunting rifle with no paper trail at all. My hometown (or was it the county) had passed a local option prohibition law in 1953; none of the hoodlums in the neighborhood bought guns by mailorder because in part there would be a paper trail right to their mail box -- and the bootleggers were running guns on the side anyway. The dry law was repealed in 1968, same year the federal 1968 GCA banned mail order guns. Ironic I guess.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I got some homemade chili canned in mason jars. Did anyone bring fixen's for s'mores?

 

[Dog Soldier]

The Mauser 1891 7.65 Engineers Carbines were excellent rifles. I wish I had kept one. They were often in unfired condition.

 

[Robert]

We appear to be drifting further and further off topic so it appears to be time to call it a day for this one.