Who Killed J.D. Tippit?

[Walt Cakebread]

Wow.  This bizarre fantasy is almost as good as the red rings.

Bizarre fantasy.... The Warren Report.

[Dan O'meara]

In those days, IIRC it was generally illegal in Texas to carry a pistol on your person unless you had a specific permit to do so. Rifles and shotguns were different. I was thinking more along the lines of someone popping out of their house with a 12-guage rather than a pistol packin' mama being on the scene. The former case is easy enough to believe; during Charles Whitman's rampage a few years later in Austin, a number of armed citizens grabbed their rifles and returned fire. That was a more drawn-out affair, however.

"...rather than a pistol packin' mama being on the scene."

  You do have a way with words Mr Todd

For argument's sake, let's say the shooter is Oswald, he's just gunned down and murdered a police officer in broad daylight so he can expect law enforcement to be descending on the area at any time. Or, Texas being Texas, some concerned citizen brandishing a 12-gauge to materialise out of nowhere. So he empty's the four used shells and reloads.
Do we know if the pistol attributed to Oswald was fully loaded when he was arrested?

[Walt Cakebread]

"...rather than a pistol packin' mama being on the scene."

  You do have a way with words Mr Todd

For argument's sake, let's say the shooter is Oswald, he's just gunned down and murdered a police officer in broad daylight so he can expect law enforcement to be descending on the area at any time. Or, Texas being Texas, some concerned citizen brandishing a 12-gauge to materialise out of nowhere. So he empty's the four used shells and reloads.
Do we know if the pistol attributed to Oswald was fully loaded when he was arrested?

Do we know if the pistol attributed to Oswald was fully loaded when he was arrested?

The police said that the S&W with the sawed off barrel that they took from Lee Oswald was fully loaded.....

But  like every piece of evidence in this case ...... we don't know if it's the truth.

[Dan O'meara]

Do we know if the pistol attributed to Oswald was fully loaded when he was arrested?

The police said that the S&W with the sawed off barrel that they took from Lee Oswald was fully loaded.....

But  like every piece of evidence in this case ...... we don't know if it's the truth.

If the revolver attributed to Oswald was found fully loaded at his arrest, it feeds into the narrative of him trying to reload after shooting Tippit.
If it had not been loaded, this would have been a problem for the same narrative (why empty the shells at the scene if you don't reload?).
LNers can easily argue that the officers who initially recovered the revolver would have no idea whether the shooter reloaded or not, if it was a plant it might have made more sense to have four spent shells still inside the revolver.

Perhaps.

When you say "sawed off" do you mean snub-nosed?

[Walt Cakebread]

If the revolver attributed to Oswald was found fully loaded at his arrest, it feeds into the narrative of him trying to reload after shooting Tippit.
If it had not been loaded, this would have been a problem for the same narrative (why empty the shells at the scene if you don't reload?).
LNers can easily argue that the officers who initially recovered the revolver would have no idea whether the shooter reloaded or not, if it was a plant it might have made more sense to have four spent shells still inside the revolver.

Perhaps.

When you say "sawed off" do you mean snub-nosed?

Yes.... But it had not left the factory as a manufactured snub nose.....   Someone had sawed the barrel off.

[Mitch Todd]

"...rather than a pistol packin' mama being on the scene."

  You do have a way with words Mr Todd

For argument's sake, let's say the shooter is Oswald, he's just gunned down and murdered a police officer in broad daylight so he can expect law enforcement to be descending on the area at any time. Or, Texas being Texas, some concerned citizen brandishing a 12-gauge to materialise out of nowhere. So he empty's the four used shells and reloads.
Do we know if the pistol attributed to Oswald was fully loaded when he was arrested?

When he was arrested, Oswald had six rounds in the cylinder (CE592) and five more in his pocket (CE518).

BTW, all we can say about the number of shots is that at least 4 were fired. One or two rounds may have missed completely, and the shells never recovered.

[Bill Brown]

19:55

Sgt. Gerald Hill admitted later that he only assumed that the shells were automatics because they were found at the scene; i.e. Hill was aware they were found at the scene and therefore assumed they were automatically ejected from the weapon as each round was fired.  This is a normal assumption to make.  Hill, at the time, was unaware that eyewitnesses watched the fleeing gunman manually removing the spent shell casings from the revolver.  Also, two of the shells were found about seventy-five feet from the patrol car and the other two shells were found about one hundred and fifty feet from the patrol car.  The shooter was standing about three or four feet from the patrol car when he fired the shots.  If they were automatics, the shell casings would all have been found right next to the patrol car.  They were not automatic shells.

[Bill Brown]

22:50

Poe testified that he could not be certain that he marked the shells.