New research discredited Oliver Stone's arguement against the magic bullet theory. But the arguements still go back and forth. Did the military-industrial complex (if one exists) really trample on democracy that day or the russians got him or the cubans?? Or was it only the lone deranged killer? Or, are you just plain tired. Happened 40 years back, why bother?55 responses total.
It might be possible the Mafia might have had a hand in it. Joe Kennedy had a lot of mob ties and they had helped get Jack into the White House. But... I doubt they were happy that Bobby was working against them with his little committee, and JFK had given them his approval. Witnesses who were at the Grassy Knoll mysteriously died by various means... insurance adjusters said the possibilities of their deaths happening were 13 million to 1, if I remember right. This was on a film I had watched on Europeans who studied the Mafia, who studied the JFK assasination, who noticed this and a number of other discrepancies. This is not the only thing-- by a long shot.
yes, there are a lot of coincidences associated with the assassination, but I am confident that there was only one assassin. He fired three rounds. the first missed. the second is the so called "magic Bullet". The third was the head shot that killed him. Now, if you want to argue who put him there, whether the mafia, the kremlin, Castro, or the CIA, you can argue all you want because an association can be found between ALL those agencies.
A friend of Jim Garrison said in an interview that he didn't thinkk that Oliver Stone would have made his movie if he had known that Garrison could daily expound on a different consspiracy theory and it would be just as convincing as the previous theory.
Stone's movie has been thoroughly discredited. An example's here: http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100sbt.html
I haven't seen the Stone movie but one that always bugged me about the single-shooter theory is that in the Zapruder film, the head shot throws Kennedy's head BACK, which is in no way explained by the physics of being shot from above and behind, but IS logical if shot from the front.
I ran across an explanation of that while channel-surfing Friday evening, I think it was (could have been yesterday, though). Someone ran some experiments with human skulls filed with white powder and 'anmial matter', IIRC, and then fired some bullets through them, filming the results for analysis. Apparently, the force of . . . stuff . . . exiting along with the bullet is sufficient to drive the head backwards.
Assuming you are talking about a frontal shot - the force of "stuff....exiting" would actually push the head forward (see under "jet engine"). The force backwards comes from absorbing the momentum of the bullet as it slows down.
As much as I suspect there were more than one gunman, the following. I don't know much about ballistics but is the rocking effect on the head not induced by the impact? In other words: heavy caliber rifle, more impact? And what about the distance? Doesn't that have an effect?
Okay, I think I get it. The bullet transfers (some portion of) its energy to the head, but the bulk of that is what expels the additional material. The actual energy of impact is minimal by comparison to the ejection force, which directly propels the head in the direction opposite of the ejection. The head would move significantly in the direction the bullet was travelling only if the energy of the bullet was retained within the head itself, as by something stopping or deflecting the bullet (which would cause movement, but in a direction determined by the degree of deflection of the bullet). Interestingly, the visible effect of the initial impact would be lessened by the fact that the head was moving away from the source at the time of impact. Well, the single-shooter theory just got a boost in my book.
(Rane, in the particular case under discussion, the killing shot is believed to have been made from behind, not from in front.)
Myth Busters covered this one. Turned out to be a busted myth.
Would you care to elaborate, vidar?
(Re #10:...which is why I specified. However the experiments that were being described, if they are the ones shown on TV, were conducted with frontal impact. So, how were the experiments conducted? Re #9: it is momentum at issue here, not energy. Momentum is a vector, so if the bullet enters in direction x and is deflected off in the direction y at right angles, *all* of the x momentum is transferred to the head. However when the bullet exits at right angles, it takes away y momentum, so the head will react in the opposite direction. If the bullet goes straight through, one can still look at it as the head absorbing all of the x momentum on entry, but then receiving some remaining -x (reverse) momentum on leaving. Since the entering momentum is greater than the leaving momentum, the head ends up being forced in the +x direction.)
To me, the suspicious thing is how could Oswald fire those shots so quickly. His marine testing rated him as average. And what about several people who reportedly heard shots being fired from the other direction too?
Echoes around the plaza are certainly a potential factor, and why should Oswald's Marine testing be the final determinant of his potential as a marksman. He might have learned to do better subsequent to that testing. Perhaps he was more motivated to practice for this test than the Marine one...
Yep, could be. Or maybe it was a lucky shot.
They showed his marine rating sheet on the programthe other day, adn he rated sharpshooter. He was getting groups on a handsbreadth at 200 yards. The dealy plaza shots were only 88 yards. And three shots in 4 seconds is no problem, even with a bolt action rifle. if you have the training, it isn't that difficult. I can draw, aim and fire three shots from my pistol (2 to the chest, one to the head) in 4 seconds at 20 yards. Also, Keep in mind, he had a gun rest, the first round was already in the chamber, so all he really had to do was fire 1 round every 2 seconds after firing the first round. Very easy.
Mmm, I believe he had more than eight seconds to fire off the last two shots.
Paragraph two is so completely irrelevant as to make one wonder what purpose it serves besides bragging (resp:17). Also, keep in mind that Oswalds target was moving at what? 20+ mph? away from him and across his field of fire at an angle, and he had to both reload and reacquire his target each time before firing. Suddenly it doesn't sound so reasonable, huh?
The speed was more like 5 miles per hour, I think. Weren't some of the agents walking?
I think it was a motorcade, but it's been a while since I've seen the footage, so if I misremembered it, forgive me. However, the point still stands, though perhaps less extremely.
He was using a single shot rifle?
No, he was using a bolt action rifle, but it had 6 rd magazine. The point of the second paragraph was that there is a lot of time to aim and fire a gun in 4 seconds, and if you are trained in it's use, the shot was not hard at all. The first shot missed, probably because of nerves, then the training he had kicked in adn the second two shots were easy.
whore.
The motorcade was going about 10mph when Oswald first fired, and it was traveling more or less straight away from Oswald's elevated position, and Oswald was using a scope--a pretty easy shot. Plus, once shots started ringing out, the driver of Kennedy's limo took his foot off the accelerator and turned around to see what was happening, coming to an almost dead stop just in time for the final fatal bullet. The first shot probably missed because Oswald was trying to fire through tree branches (one of which presumably deflected the bullet).
Oswald could have been knowledgeable of a conspiracy, but I
thing the way to handle Oswald was to make *him* think of the idea.
He seems like the personality that can swing quickly on an issue, so
any handler could leave with oppurtunity and his 'free will'; letting
him know how much of a 'hero' he can be, and have his place in
history.
I seem to recall that Oswald might have had something against
Gov. Connelly, but it didn't seem to be covered in the programs in
the past week.
Could a grassy knoll shotter have missed? Waited for another
shotter to start? Know of Oswald, without Oswald knowing of him?
You wouldn't want Oswald to know you arranged 'back-up'. What about
the glass in the limo that was shot through? Experts who repaired
the car said that a bullet entered front to back--not even allowing
Oswald's missed shot to go there.
Why didn't the driver take advantage of the clear road ahead
of him on the first shot--he was trained.
Who got Oswald the job at the SBD? The route was known
those six weeks ahead at the time someone found him the job.
I happened to be in Dallas a few years ago with a weekend free, so I went to the 6th floor of the Schoolbook Repository building, which is now a museum devoted to the assassination. It was very moving and well done, and I recommend it for anyone interested. I have a better sense of where all the landmarks are, for having seen them in person.
Oswald got his job at the TBD via his landlord (Ruth Paine). Kennedy's Dallas destination (the Trademart) was picked about a week before the trip, the motorcade route was decided on a few days after that, and a detailed description of the route was published in the Dallas newspapers a couple of days beforehand. If one is going to believe that The Conspiracy craftily arranged to have Oswald in the perfect position to shoot JFK, one would need to include Ruth Paine, the management at the TBD, members of the Kennedy administration, the Texas Democratic Party, the Secret Service, and the Dallas police among the plotters. Hardly likely.
the book by posner (gerald posner, i think) finely detialed the non-conspiracy, single-bullet reality. until i read taht book, the 'single bullet' idea was, to me, wishful dreaming. the implications of 'conspiracy' adn the inplications of 'nutty loner' are so manifest with explosive adn corrosive reactions that, begrudgingly, i became willing to 'buy' the warren commission report - as defective as i believe it was/is - as a craven cooling=-off (smothering) for americans in general. expecially at that time, anything more involved than 'one lone nut' would ahve been fodder for incendiary retaliation(s) the likes of which i, for one, would not have wanted to witness. so america took its lumps and moved on, painfully, and w/o much closure. the posner book is recommended reading however. it will calm your nerves. btw, where were you when .....? i was in a military science adn tactics class studyign the 81mm mortar.
I was in 4th grade when it happened. we were sent home early, the 6th graders were the only ones who knew what had happended and many of them were crying. They were told not to tell teh rest of us.
"hey you little 4th grade pussies, guess what i just heard!" 8D
I was in 3rd grade, in Red Cedar School in East Lansing. Mrs. Claycomb's class. We were watching a music lesson on local public television (at the time, Channel 10 was time-shared between educational WMSB and NBC affiliate WILX). The East Lansing school district presumably was able to centralize elementary school music instruction by broadcasting it on cheap local TV, but I didn't understand this at the time. I thought Mrs. Acevedo (the music teacher) was a celebrity, practically as big a TV star as Walter Cronkite. Anyway, Mrs. Acevedo was going through the "Do Re Mi Re Do" stuff (slowly, with a piano) when the program was interrupted. No visual, just a slide saying "NBC NEWS" or similar. The president had been shot. Afterwards, the music lesson came back on, and we continued. I don't think we were let out of school early. I didn't find out that he had died until I got home and found my mother crying. It wasn't until many years later (like the 1990s) that I found out that my mother had a miscarriage around this same time, in late November 1963.
I was in my first year of graduate school at the University of Michigan, attending class (modern algebra) at the time of the assassination. Went back to my dorm room after class to study and didn't learn of the shooting until an hour or so later when I heard someone down the hall playing the radio loudly. It sounded like a newscast reporting a violent incident of some kind, but I couldn't catch all the details, so I turned on my radio and soon learned what had happened.
I was in drafting class: we were dismissed early. Can you believe that when I arrived home, I turned on the radio and not the television? 'Tis hard to imagine nowadays.
(True - hard to imagine, although there are exceptions. During last summer's power blackout there was no choice, as the radio had batteries but the TV didn't.)
The US spent a lot of money on defense in that era. And very big sums were involved. Why isn't it very likely that the so-called military- industrial nexus might have led it? The end of the vietnam war would've cost the defense contractors several hundred billions of dollars.
where were you sj2?
I was only two when jfk was shot. I do remember when his brother Bobby was killed a few years later. When I got home from school, my mother was crying and greatly distressed. She loved the Kennedys then.
whore.
we can imagine a single-bullet-theory that might
directly involve willcome
I'm thinking more like 125 bullets. Why miss a good opportunity?
I remember someone sticking her head in the classroom door to announce that the President had been shot. My mother drove us home from school (me, some neighbor kids, and probably my siblings, e'en though the younger wasn't in school yet). 'Twas raining. I watched a lot of television with my parents over the next few days.
I'm too young to remember the Kennedy assassination. The first major news event I vividly remember is the Challenger explosion.
Same here.
I was home with the flu on the day the Challenger exploded. I watched it live since I was a fan of the space program.
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The first major news event I remember vividly was the moon landing. My dad was in grad school on North Campus and I remember him and my mom waking me up to watch the TV. I was in the dorm tv lounge (Mary Markley) when Challenger went down.
I was listening to WKAR-FM, but I was lightly asleep. I awoke, startled, to the normal music broadcast, but I felt rattled enough to turn on the television. An interrupting announcement must have been enough to wake me, although I didn't have any idea of having heard one.
My class at school was watching the liftoff live on TV.
Re #47: Strange. So was I...
:-)
i was home sick also when the challenger exploded, but i was faking it.
Re #51: What was the name of that guy who had it on in his room on our
hall? He was part Latino or something.
Sadly, time has faded my memory of many of the names.
Same here, apparently.
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