2 – Oswald Wasn’t that Skilled of a Marksman
For Oswald to carry out the assassination, he would need to have been an excellent marksman. Although the President was never more than 90 yards from his position on the sixth floor of the TSBD, he didn’t have much time to complete the mission. First of all, the limo was moving away from his position, and a tree obscured it at a certain point in the journey. Add in the fact that the shots had to be fired in a few seconds and the rifle was pretty unreliable, and you have a scenario where only a skilled shooter could be successful.
To assist the Warren Commission, the U.S. Army and FBI allowed their best marksmen to try and emulate Oswald’s shooting by taking aim from the position where he allegedly shot Kennedy using the rifle found on the sixth floor of the TSBD. The shooters even fixed some of the rifle’s issues, yet they were unable to replicate Oswald’s feat; which was to hit the target in two out of three attempts within six seconds.
Clearly, the Commission needed to prove that Oswald was a better shot than all of the sharpshooters that participated in the test but it failed completely. Oswald was a Marine marksman and served in the military for a few years before the assassination. In 1956, he just about passed the standard required to become a military sharpshooter. His score of 212 was just two points above the 210 point Sharpshooter requirement and well below the 220 needed for ‘expert’ classification. Oswald’s skill deteriorated in the intervening years, and he scored just 191 in May 1959, just one point above the minimum Marksman standard.
When an FBI firearms specialist analyzed the rifle, he said that the target kept moving away from the point of impact. A U.S. Army rifle expert said there were problems with the trigger mechanism and the bolt. Furthermore, gun experts said that Oswald would have needed to ‘sight-in’ the gun by firing it 10 times without ammo before using live ammunition. In interviews with the Secret Service and FBI in December 1963, Marina claimed that Oswald did not practice with the rifle. She had changed her mind by the time she spoke to the Warren Commission in 1964 and said he practiced with it in a field.
Even if he did practice, Oswald at his best was still below the level of the shooters who were unable to replicate his feat. Not only did he need to hit a moving target, but he was also using an unreliable weapon, and he had to make three shots, two of them hitting the target, in just six seconds. While he could have gotten lucky, the issue with the gun residue raised in #1 suggests that Oswald did not shoot President Kennedy.