61 Years ago today JFK was assassinated

Who did it, and,

Most importantly, will Trump release the files...

https://x.com/DrLoupis/status/1859914833241715093

Everybody knows it was the CIA.

Oh this should get interesting. . .

LBJ and the deep state.

A man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, a perpetual malcontent, did it. He used a surplus Carcano rifle with a cheap scope.

His first shot missed his target so badly, it hit a curb. Spalling from the shot hit a man standing nearby and cut his cheek.

The second shot hit Kennedy in his upper back, passed out through his throat, passed through the jump seat Texas Governor Connally was sitting in, passed through Connally's torso, breaking a rib, fractured his wrist and embedded itself in his leg.

The third and final shot struck Kennedy in the back of the head.

In March, 1963, Oswald used the same rifle to attempt to kill General Edwin Walker, with testimony from Oswald's wife Marina supporting the evidence.

After the assassination, Oswald also murdered Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit with a war surplus S&W revolver, which had been converted from .38/200 to .38 Special, before being captured by authorities in a Dallas movie theater.

Two days later, Oswald was murdered by Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby.

Any other questions?

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
LBJ and the deep state.

Sixty-one years later and you have no actual proof of this.

Neither is there any actual proof of Grassy Knoll shooters or any of the other stupid bullshit put forth by people who have not studied the actual evidence.

It's all whackadoo fantasy from people who can't see the plain truth of the matter.

Take all the various theories and you will find that those who support the respective theories all will tell you why they're certain they're right. All of them. It simply cannot be.

Occam's Razor

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:
The Latin phrase cui bono translates to "who benefits?"

Oswald expected to benefit.

Really, it's very simple, but oh, so boring. This is why everyone but space aliens in flying saucers has been suggested to be behind the assassination.

There was never a conspiracy. It was one misfit with a rifle. Just as with James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, Oswald acted alone, but people don't want to accept that some little pissant with a gun can actually change history. No, there must necessarily be some vast and complex machine in the shadows. It just ain't so. As a matter of fact, one man acting alone might have a greater chance of success, without co-conspirators to betray him or complex moving parts of a machine to fail at various points in a plot.

As Franklin said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

A man, acting alone, keeps his secrets.

Thank you, Para.
The internet has many faults, but a dearth of made-up conspiracy theories is not one of them.

Ooh, here we go again. I saw Big Foot in my backyard the other night.

For a long time I wondered about the shooting, then in the early 2000s I got a chance to visit Dealy Plaza. Like my trip to Antietam or Normandy, walking the actual ground completely changed my understanding of events.

If you doubt Oswald's ability to pull this off with a war surplus 6.5mm Carcano, go stand in the street and look up to the window, or look from the window down and you'll see it was actually a fairly simple downhill shot, with next to no deflection.



Then recall it was three shots in 6 seconds. But most of the recreations I've seen, the first shot isn't what starts the clock. In Dealy Plaza, shot one is at zero seconds. That means it was two more shots in six seconds, easily done with a bolt rifle and bit a practice.

Oswald was the assassin.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
LBJ and the deep state.

Sixty-one years later and you have no actual proof of this.

No, I don't. Just my gut.

Back and to the left. Back...and to the left.

I've previously lived in Dallas and used to work a few blocks away. Been to the area countless times.

We'll never know why Oswald didn't shoot when the convertible limo was on Houston St. It was an easier shot - the road is level, the road is straight, it's a shorter distance, and no trees.

Elm St is a more difficult shot. It's downhill, there is a curve, and there is a tree. Additionally, follow-up shots would be more difficult as well due to the aforementioned. Frankly, County Records Building is a better sniper's hide for Elm St than the Schoolbook Depository.

It was Col. Mustard in the library.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Back and to the left. Back...and to the left.

Uh huh

You're demonstrating that your knowledge of the facts is entirely superficial.

Got some light reading for you, Gustofer:

https://www.archives.gov/resea...hapter-3.html#wounds

What Physics Reveals About the JFK Assassination

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When the president was shot, he says, Kennedy’s head exploded, as the film so graphically shows. Nalli’s model shows that the wound wasn’t where the bullet exited, but where it entered. It demonstrates that a temporary cavity formed inside the president’s soft tissue as the momentum and kinetic energy of the bullet smashed into his skull, causing his head to snap forward.

Based on his model, Nalli also thinks that the theory of a second shooter and that of the president being shot by hollow-point or soft-point bullets are also unlikely. Not only were such bullets never recovered, he writes, but the movements of Kennedy’s head are only consistent with a shot from the back.

Nalli’s not the first person to use physics to model the bullet’s trajectory—the head wound and ballistics are covered in-depth in the Warren Report. But, writes Nalli, his model is unique in that it focuses on the forward motion of the president’s head after he was shot.

“The Zapruder film shows President Kennedy being shot from behind and not from the infamous grassy knoll, in corroboration of the official autopsy findings,” says Nalli in a release. “That’s the only ‘smoking gun’ in the film

Gunshot-wound dynamics model for John F. Kennedy assassination

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Figure 2 shows the two Zapruder Film frames that captured the fatal shot, namely Z312 (the moment just before impact) and Z313 (the moment just following impact). In Z313 the catastrophic effect of the energy deposit from a supersonic projectile passing through a human head is clearly evident. However, while it is not immediately noticeable at this scale (and not detectable while viewed in motion at normal speed), a careful comparison between the two frames also reveals that President Kennedy's head snaps forward from Z312 to Z313 [9, pp. 87–89], as referenced to the red dashed line labeled O. There is nothing new in this observation—early researchers with access to the still frames first noticed this in the mid-to-late 1960s. Notable among these is author Josiah Thompson, who estimated the position of the President's head relative to two fixed objects on the rear of the limousine, the results of which are plotted in his book Six Seconds in Dallas (1967) [9, p. 91] that will be returned to in Section 2.2. However, for the moment it should be noted that this motion amounts to an anomalous forward impulse on the order of several centimeters over the time interval of one Zapruder frame (≈0.055 s) at the moment of impact (an impulse comparable to Connally's “lapel flap”). It is also crucial to note that this anomalous forward impulse at Z313 is only observed on Kennedy's head—it is not observed on any of the other limo occupants (with reference to dotted lines c, d and f), nor is it even observed on Kennedy's own torso (line b), wherein lies his body's center-of-mass (CM). This implies that an isolated real force acted directly (and solely) upon the President's head just prior to Z313; the only plausible source for this instantaneous, isolated forcing mechanism is manifestly and unequivocally the projectile impact. Therefore, what follows in Sections 2.1.1–2.1.4 is an examination of the relevant dynamics involved in the direct interaction [18] of a high-speed projectile with a human head.

quote:

We'll never know why Oswald didn't shoot when the convertible limo was on Houston St. It was an easier shot - the road is level, the road is straight, it's a shorter distance, and no trees.

I've only been to the actual site once but that just reinforced what I've learned in the decades before.
The shot as he was right under the window was actually harder because it was a target moving side to side as it passed the closest. As it continued away from him it became a steadier target and was never all that far away.

As to who had a motive?
Lots of people and a few groups. But in the end, it was just one nut job that lucked into the opportunity and had just enough skill and equipment to pull it off.
Simple and boring to some, but the truth.

I did not shoot JFK.

Oswald's screwed up mother had convinced her precious little boy from an early age that he was special and bound for greatness. Oswald couldn't understand why he wasn't recognized for the superstar genius he was. Really, she was nuts and she created quite a little narcissist in her son.

When he came back from Russia, he struggled in poverty with shit jobs and when the opportunity to Kill Kennedy came about, he jumped at it. Y'see, it's really as simple as that: It's not some great conspiracy that Oswald worked in a building on the Kennedy motorcade route; it's just coincidence, and if it hadn't happened that way, we would not know Oswald's name and Kennedy would likely have been a two-term POTUS.

And for those of you who think that Oswald was a Russian plant because he defected- no, Oswald defected because he was perpetually dissatisfied with his low position in a capitalist society and decided that anything would be better, including the false Utopia of the Soviet Union. And when that didn't work out (as nothing and no place ever could for someone like Oswald) he returned to the United States.

Anyone who wants to understand Oswald's time in Russia, read Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale. In it, there are extensive KGB transcripts from Oswald's bugged apartment, which demonstrate that ol' Lee Harvey was just a sad schlub, arguing with his wife over, well, everything

One of the accounts I read about Oswald indicated he was a very good shot. He would hang clothes pins up and shoot them with a revolver, spinning them until they shattered.
Using my own bolt gun, I could meet the 6 second timeline and I am no bolt action expert.

Anyone who is really interested in the facts surrounding the incident owes it to themselves to read Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi.

And to address the question of “How could someone like that have managed such a kill shot?” that has been asked time and again by the innocently ignorant and people who should know better, below is a repost of a discussion of how mediocre shots with an imprecise rifle, sight, and ammunition can manage something like that.

I often see people say, “I don’t believe in coincidences,” which is a another way of saying they don’t believe in chance—except it is expressed in a way that makes them seem smarter (to themselves, anyway) than they actually are. Chance in fact affects us humans more than any other factor in our lives, and sometimes it favors the good guys, but sometimes it favors the bad guys.

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How unskilled shooters with poor rifles get hits when marksmen can’t.

Bringing this back up with some minor editing as possibly being of renewed interest. If you haven’t seen this before, I realize that a superficial reading (and especially none at all) may result in confusion about what its point is, but there’s nothing I can do about that except stress that if you truly want to understand it, it will require a bit of effort.
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This is a general discussion about the topic and not limited to any particular incident, so please keep the discussion to what it’s about. In specific incidents there are usually factors that influence the outcome besides what this thread is about, but I’m not addressing those. This thread is about ballistics and shooter skill.

Something that often comes up in discussions about shootings is, “How could he have done that? He was a poor shot using a crappy gun, and even skilled marksmen have never been able to duplicate his feat.” It’s a question that’s been asked over and over for decades, and I read the same statement just recently in a book by a former military sniper who was convinced that his inability to accomplish the same thing meant that the official explanation of an assassination must be incorrect.

How are such things possible? Glad you asked:

For this discussion, assume we have two rifles, one that’s extremely precise and accurate*, and is capable of delivering 0.2 minute of angle shot groups centered on the point of aim every time it’s used. The other rifle is a much less precise 3 MOA rifle. We also have two shooters, one (the marksman) who is highly skilled and aims the gun at exactly the same place every time, and the other who doesn’t. Finally, we have our target which is a 4 inch circle located 100 yards from the shooters.

* (Precision is the ability to shoot small groups; accuracy is hitting the target. And they’re not just my definitions; they are widely accepted among precision shooters these days.)

The below illustration shows the hits that might be achieved by the skilled marksman using the two rifles (the illustrations are not exactly to scale; they are to demonstrate the points, not be used for precise measurements). Each × represents a bullet hit. The five shot group on the left that’s aimed at the center of the target is with the 0.2 MOA rifle; the one on the right is a possible group fired with the 3 MOA rifle. Note that all shots with either rifle hit the 4 inch target, and therefore although only the first rifle is precise, both are accurate.





The next illustration shows a couple of possible groups fired with the same two rifles but when the rifles are fired with the point of aim outside the targets, or about 2.5 inches from their centers.





Now all the shots with the precise rifle will miss. The reasons for the point of aim to be outside the target could be that the shooter was not skilled; the circumstances of the shot made precise aiming impossible, such as with a moving, partially obscured target; or if there was some combination of the two. On the other hand, shots with the imprecise rifle and the same offset point of aim might hit the target due to chance and the larger dispersion of its shots.

Another possibility that is seldom, if ever, discussed is that the rifle involved is relatively precise—let’s say it and the ammunition are a 2 MOA combination, but that the sight is really poorly zeroed and the center of that 2-inch group at 100 yards is 8 inches from the point of aim. A skilled marksman who kept aiming at the center of a 4 inch target would never hit closer than 5 inches from the target. A poor shot, however, whose point of aim was wandering over a large circle might get at hit by chance. In one infamous incident the shooter’s first (or possibly second) point of aim was so bad that the shot missed an entire car at less than 100 yards.

Scoring hits by chance is something that virtually every shooter has experienced, but many of us don’t (or refuse to) recognize the fact. A man I knew once described the tiny three-shot cloverleaf group he achieved with a 243 Winchester rifle, and after drawing the group on a piece of paper he announced that he had never fired the rifle again. And what did that one group demonstrate about the precision of the rifle or the skill of the shooter? If you answered, “Nothing,” congratulations for getting the right answer. We have no way of knowing what his previous groups were like, what groups consisting of more shots would have been like, or what his groups would have been like if he had continued to shoot the rifle.

The inability of highly skilled shooters using an atrocious rifle and sight to achieve a killing hit on a moving head at 80 to 100 yards does not prove that a moderately skilled assassin could not have accomplished the feat by simple chance—good luck for him, and bad luck for the victim.

Added in November 2022. All of the foregoing is based on my own independent research and analysis. Because I’d never seen it discussed by any of the many authorities—genuine and otherwise—who have expressed puzzlement and disbelief about “How could he have done that?” for a long time I could almost believe that I was the first and only person to understand and explain it. Some time after I first posted this, though, I found the phenomenon explained in a United Kingdom War Office manual, Small Arms Training: Sniping, Volume I, Pamphlet No. 28 (1946). So, not surprising, there is almost nothing new under the sun, just things that never attract much attention or understanding.

LHW was a Marine and Marines are taught to be marksmen, particularly back then. Not saying it was an easy shot but certainly was a reasonable shot for someone with training.