Tests supervised by the Italian Army on a Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle, similar to the one said to have been used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), on November 22, 1963, claim that it would have taken at least 19 seconds to get off the three shots allegedly fired by Oswald.The Warren Commission, (responsible for the investigation into the murder), concluded that the shots which killed JFK, were fired by Oswald in only 7 seconds.
The report, was published by the Italian news agency ANSA and has since been picked up by United Press International (UPI) and reported briefly on Sky News. It is sketchy on details, claiming only that "The tests were done in a former Carcano factory in Terni." and that "In one test, a bullet was fired through two large pieces of meat to simulate the assumed path of a shot that the Warren Commission concluded struck Texas Gov. John Connally after passing through Kennedy's body. In the test, the bullet ended deformed, while the bullet in the Kennedy assassination remained intact."
Comment
It is strange that this report should appear in the same week that Time Magazine is running a piece on its website claiming that JFK's brother, Robert Francis Kennedy, (RFK) assassinated in June 1968, was "America's first J.F.K. assassination-conspiracy theorist." In the case of RFK, the man said to have been responsible for the murder, Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan, has since retracted his admission of guilt and demanded a retrial, claiming that he was framed and that crucial evidence was destroyed.
75% of the American people believe that John Kennedy was killed by an organized conspiracy. A conspiracy which did not involve Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. These days that belief is simply used as proof of the American peoples delusional desire to believe ill of their own government.
Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the murder of JFK, but was himself murdered two days later by Jack Ruby before he could stand trial. Oswald famously claimed that he was not responsible for the murder and was in fact "a patsy". The Warren Commission concluded Oswald had acted alone. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that there may have been a conspiracy. Nothing was ever done to follow up on this conclusion.
In the murder of JFK and its subsequent controversial aftermath, America became the victim of it's very own killing of the king ritual. An act, replete with tortured symbolism, which traumatized an era and enacted a profound shift in the psychic topography of American political life.
America was never the same after the death of JFK. The murder of his brother Robert; when he himself was campaigning to inherit the symbolic crown of the presidency, simply reinforced the terrible sense of helplessness that many Americans were beginning to feel. During an era of international war and internal strife, many desired a real change in the political and social culture of the Republic. It had looked (for a time), as if the Kennedy's; a newly crowned virile family dynasty would help to bring this change about.
After the assassinations, much of that idealism and hope was lost beneath the bodies of dead leaders and the endless carnage of a conflict in Vietnam. If there was a conspiracy to kill the Kennedy's and its end was to prevent the flowering of idealism into a genuine force for cultural and political transformation, then these two vile acts of sorcerous symbolism, could not have met with a greater degree of success.
