Thursday, August 22, 2019

Blast from the Past: Oswald's Rifle

I've a lot of posts which I've started but not finished.  I may lose the train of thought; more often I see something which triggers a reaction, but isn't sufficient to carry me through a discussion.

This is a  post which I abandoned for a while but which I've come back to.  I think the trigger was the discussion of the need for semi-automatic weapons, specifically against the threat of feral hogs.

To pick up the thread, back in the day there was much discussion in the Warren Report over whether Lee Harvey Oswald would have been able to get off the shots which killed Kennedy and injured Connally.  There were questions over how many shots were fired, how many struck the limousine, how many were heard. 

As I remember it, tests with a rifle like Oswald's bolt action rifle (a cheap mail-order gun) showed that a good shot could easily get off the three shots the Warren Commission determined had been shot.  IIRC the rate was 3 shots in about 5 seconds, maybe less. 

I just did a google search, on how fast you could fire a bolt-action rifle, getting conflicting results.   Obviously there are lot of variables, skill of the shooter, the weapon, scope?, distance, accuracy, etc.  Bottom line seems to be you can put out a lot of lead in a short time.

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