Oswald is alleged to have assassinated JFK with a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, a cheap Italian rifle manufactured for the Italian army in 1940 and left over from World War II.
According to a CIA dispatch on December 31, 1963, the rifle was among 100,000 Mannlicher-Carcanos that Adam Consolidated Industries imported into the United States in 1960, two years after “Italian military authorities” decided to “eliminate” them and declare them “obsolete.” Adam Consolidated purchased them “at an average price of $2.20 for serviceable 6.5 rifles” and “$1.10 for unserviceable 6.5 rifles.”
“The first lot of 7,000 rifles that Adam put on the American market had disastrous results. Many of them burst, with frequently fatal results, and many didn’t fire. This forced Adam to withdraw all the rifles from sale and check them before putting them back on the market.”
A March 17, 1964, FBI report states that the Mannlicher-Carcano that was allegedly used to kill President Kennedy, with serial number C 2766, was among “a lot of 5,200” Mannlicher-Carcanos shipped to Adam Consolidated by an Italian machine shop in 1960. It also states that Adam Consolidated said that the rifles in this particular batch were “defective” and refused to pay for them. According to the FBI report, the machine shop was engaged in “legal proceedings” to force Adam Consolidated to pay for the rifles.
William J. Waldman, who was vice president of Klein’s Sporting Goods, the mail order company that sold the Mannlicher-Carcano allegedly used in the assassination, testified to the Warren Commission that the rifle cost $19.95 with a scope, plus $1.50 postage and handling, and that without a scope, it would have cost only $12.95. He further testified that a gunsmith who worked for Klein’s attached a scope to the rifle after drilling holes into it.
He was then asked if the gunsmith or “anyone else” had done “boresighting” (which involves using a sight-aligning tool and aligning the crosshairs) “or actual firing with the sight” to check and see how accurately the sight was aligned with the rifle.
Waldman replied, “No; it’s very unlikely in an inexpensive rifle of this sort that he would do anything other than roughly align the scope with the rifle.”
In a letter to the Warren Commission, the FBI reported, “No indication was found that the telescopic sight was remounted. Its position on the rifle, the mounting screws, and the screw holes show no evidence of having been altered.”
Ronald Simmons, Chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Department of the Army, who was in charge of test firing the Mannlicher-Carcano, was asked by the Warren Commission if the personnel who ran the test “had any difficulties with sighting the weapon.”
His reply was that “they could not sight the weapon” and had to “adjust the telescopic sight” by having “a machinist in one of our machine shops” add three shims to the telescopic sight.
FBI Special Agent Robert Frazier, with the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., testified to the Warren Commission that adjusting a telescopic sight entails “putting shims under the front of the scope and over the back of the scope to tip the scope in the mount itself, to bring it into alignment.” He also testified that there were no shims in the rifle when the FBI Laboratory first received it, but there were shims “mounted in the rifle” when the Army Ballistics Lab returned it to them.
After it was determined where the rifle was purchased and how much it cost, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spoke to President Johnson by phone on November 23, 1963, and said, “It seems almost impossible to think that for $21.00 you could kill the President of the United States.”
Colonel Allison Folsom, who examined Oswald’s Marine Corps records for the Warren Commission, testified that Oswald’s record showed that his marksmanship was “not good” and that his average score over a two-day period was 36 when “people should get a score of between 48 and 50.” The record also showed that Oswald scored at the bottom in classification and aptitude tests when he entered the Marine Corps in 1956, that he was court-martialed twice, and that he had been demoted from private first class to private.
In addition to his testimony, Colonel Folsom sent a letter to the Warren Commission on June 8, 1964, regarding Oswald’s marksmanship. It states that a Marine would qualify as an Expert with a minimum score of 220, would qualify as a Sharpshooter with a minimum score of 210, and would qualify as a Marksman with a minimum score of 190.
Folsom stated that according to Oswald’s Marine Corps record, on December 21, 1956, two months after Oswald joined the Marines and received his initial Marine Corps training, he received a score of 212, two points above the minimum for sharpshooter, while firing at a stationary target with a Marine-issued M-1 rifle on a Marine Corps rifle range. On May 6, 1959, four months before his defection to the Soviet Union, his score was 191, one point above the bare minimum to qualify as a Marksman.
Folsom also stated, “A low Marksman qualification indicates a rather poor shot and a Sharpshooter qualification indicates a fairly good shot.”
Colonel Folsom’s information shows clearly that after Oswald’s first two months of intensive Marine Corps training, he managed to qualify at the low end of being a “fairly good shot.” But two and a half years later, with a score that was one point above the bare minimum to qualify as a Marksman, Oswald was nowhere near a “fairly good shot.” He was most definitely a “rather poor shot,” even though he was still firing at a stationary target with a Marine-issued M-1 rifle on a Marine Corps rifle range.
Oswald’s ability to pull off even one precision shot would have not only been hampered by his total lack of competence and his poor marksmanship, but it would have been rendered completely impossible by shooting at a moving target with a cheap rifle that had a scope that was in no way aligned with the rifle.
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