The Strange Short History of Oswald s Gun and Ammo

“Enhanced photo of Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle, serial No. C2766, “CE 139-S01, Record Group 272, Warren Commission.

According to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and his band of merry commissioners, the rifle that was used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, on November 22, 1963, was a 6.5×52mm Italian Mannlicher-Carcano M91/38 bolt-action short rifle. It was made in Italy in 1940 and, after World War II, held as military surplus in Italy and the United States until A.J. Hidell (a Lee Harvey Oswald pseudonym) purchased it by mail from a Chicago sporting goods company

Mind you, in 1963, there were no restrictions of any kind in buying a rifle in a Texas store for cash, anonymously. In purchasing the gun in the name of Hidell and carrying around phony Hidell IDs in his several wallets, Oswald created the perfect paper trail back to himself, if his rifle was ever used in the commission of a crime and later discovered (which is what happened).

Klein’s Sporting Goods shipped the rifle to the Dallas PO box on March 20, 1963. I am assuming the rifle came with its cheap, bolt-on telescopic sight mounted haphazardly. No bullets were included in the order. Nor were any bullets ever found among Oswald’s possessions, which means if he did fire the gun (as per the conclusions of the Warren Commission) at General Walker (on April 10, 1963) and later at President Kennedy, he only ever owned or possessed five bullets (one was found in the chamber but not fired).

According to Lee’s wife Marina Oswald, after first shooting the gun in a Dallas neighborhood at Walker (a John Birch, conservative, right-wing, retired general), Oswald buried the rifle across the street in the woods of a public park and only retrieved it some days later.

Mind you: witnesses in the alley behind General Walker��s house in Dallas reported, after hearing the shot, seeing men scattering in the nearby parking lot and that one of them placed “a long object” in the backseat of a waiting car.

Retrieved from the good earth, the gun was packed up and moved in summer 1963 to New Orleans, where Marina said sometimes Lee would sit on the steps of their rented Magazine Street apartment and “click” the trigger of the unloaded rifle.

At summer’s end, when Marina moved back to Dallas with her friend Ruth Paine, presumably they also moved Lee’s rifle (rolled up in a blanket) to Mrs. Paine’s garage, while Oswald himself went to Mexico City on the bus.

Both Marina and Mrs. Paine later denied knowledge of having moved the rifle to Irving, Texas, but that’s the only way it could have gotten there, and presumably they dumped it together with Oswald’s other possessions on the floor of the garage (without ever realizing the content that was wrapped in the blanket).

Ruth’s husband Michael testified that sometimes in the tight garage he would knock into or step on the rolled-up blanket, but he too had no idea that a rifle was inside. I find all these denials a little hard to believe.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, Oswald collected his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle off the garage floor (not exactly how a Marine Corps sharpshooter would look after his weapon), broke it down, and placed it in thick, industrial brown paper, which he then put in the backseat of Buell Wesley Frazier’s car.

On arriving at the parking area near the Texas School Book Depository, where both men worked, Oswald carried the paper bag (in which most assume was the Mannlicher-Carcano) between his armpit and his cupped right hand, although even a broken-down Mannlicher-Carcano would not have fit in that space between Oswald’s hand and shoulder.

Once upstairs, in theory, Oswald put the rifle back together, although he was never seen with it in his possession or firing it (even though a work colleague ate his lunch near to the so-called “sniper’s lair” on the sixth floor).

Nevertheless, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald fired the rifle three times at 12:30 p.m., and that it was his final head shot that killed the American president. Then Oswald openly carried the rifle across the sixth floor of the warehouse and hid it in between some boxes near a narrow side staircase.

It was about an hour after the assassination that Oswald’s rifle was found, except that the policemen on the scene, and subsequent FBI reports, all identified the found weapon as a 7.65 Mauser.

On 11.22.1963 Lee Oswald shot President Kennedy while the President was riding in an open automobile on Elm Street. The rifle used was a Mauser which Oswald had ordered (this is now known by handwriting examination) from Klein’s Mail Order House, Chicago, Illinois.

The Dallas policeman, Seymour Weitzman, who identified the found rifle, had previously worked in a sporting goods store and was knowledgeable about guns, even though it wasn’t difficult to read the word “Mauser” engraved on the barrel.

The Mauser morphed into the Mannlicher-Carcano later in the custody of the Dallas police, when it was figured out that Hidell and Oswald were the same person, and that a Mannlicher-Carcano was delivered to their/his post office box. In any case, the Mauser, if it ever existed (I assume it did), disappeared.

Then, finally, there’s a third gun that may have been found that day in the Texas School Book Depository. This passage appears in James Fetzer’s Murder in the Dealey Plaza:

Police officers are filmed by Ernest Charles Mentesana removing a rifle from the roof of the TSBD. The rifle has no sling, no scope and protrudes at least 7-8 inches past the stock. In the film two police officers are standing on a fire escape at the seventh floor of the Depository gesturing to the roof. In the next sequence, the rifle is being examined. When Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Thayer Waldo questions a secretary who is privy to the officers’ conversation, she tells Waldo that police officers found the rifle on the “roof of the School Book Depository.” There is no official record of this rifle.

Later experts who examined Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano concluded that the sight was “off” and that the bolt action “tended to stick.” Nor were any traces of dirt found on the rifle, from when it was buried in the park near General Walker’s house.

Nevertheless, despite the misaligned scope and sticky bolt, the Warren Commission deemed that the rifle was capable of killing the president with three shots fired from it over 6.2 seconds—although the only way an FBI expert marksman could use it to fire off three shots in six seconds was to forego aiming (especially at a moving car heading downhill on the far side of a leafy tree).

There were two more problems with the rifle: on November 22, 1963, when the Dallas police subjected Oswald to a “paraffin test,” to detect whether any gunpowder particles were on Oswald’s cheeks (which would have indicated that he had fired a rifle that day), that test came up negative.

Finally, no traces of wool particles from the famous Paine garage blanket, in which the rifle was wrapped for so long, ever showed up on the Mannlicher-Carcano.

6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge from rifle. (FBI exhibit C8). Warren Commission.

As confusing as the number of rifles found at the Texas School Book Depository was, so was the accounting of the bullets and shell casings found around the scene of the crime.

All the Warren Commission ever wanted was that the three shell casings found in the assassin’s lair matched the three shots fired from Oswald’s Hidell-owned Mannlicher-Carcano, and that those bullets matched up to the slugs removed from President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. But even a rudimentary tally of the ammunition surrounding the assassination suggests grave problems for the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Let’s start with Oswald’s rifle and the shell casings found on the ledge in the lair. In theory, those casings popped out of the Mannlicher-Carcano randomly when Oswald was firing away at the president’s motorcade (instead, two ended up in a line under the ledge).

Second, the policemen who found the casings—in keeping with Dallas police procedure—said they had initialed the ledge shell casings, although their initials are not on the casings that later were introduced into evidence.

Then there is the possibility that the shell casings used as evidence against Oswald themselves were from a Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle, not a Mannlicher-Carcano. Finally, there are reports that other shell casings were found on the fourth floor of the TSBD.

Then there is the perplexing issue that no extra bullets for Oswald’s rifle were ever located. No gun store in Dallas (and the FBI went to all of them) reported ever selling him bullets for a Mannlicher-Carcano, and no extra ammo (for his rifle or his .38 revolver) was ever located among Oswald’s possessions, which means he embarked on the crime of the century with exactly four bullets in the chamber of his war-surplus, bolt-action rifle (which had an ammunition clip that could take up to six bullets). And it also means that the ammunition in his gun could well have been more than twenty years old and prone to misfiring. No rifle range ever reported that Oswald had fired the Mannlicher-Carcano in target practice.

Apparently, the only time he ever fired the weapon was when he attempted to kill right-wing General Walker in his home office (by shooting through a rear window). Walker was seated in a chair working on his taxes, but the shot missed. In any case, a mangled slug was retrieved from Walker’s parlor, a 30.06 bullet (7.62 mm), while anything shot from Oswald’s rifle would have been 6.5mm x 52mm.

It was Marina Oswald who later made the connection between her (then dead) husband and the Walker shooting. General Walker himself denied that the bullet that missed him could have come from a Mannlicher-Carcano, and a witness near Walker’s house spoke of seeing two men fleeing the crime scene. (Many theorize that Walker himself staged the near-miss shooting, to draw sympathy for himself and his extreme right-wing, John Birch positions.)

While we’re on the subject of stray bullets, there’s a problem that the bullet fragments found in the assassination victims and in the presidential limousine add up to more than two bullets, which thus invalidates the conclusions of the Warren Commission and its Magic Bullet.

According to the commission, one shot missed the limousine entirely (and grazed the cheek of James Tague standing near the Triple Overpass); another shot—the Magic one—wounded JFK and Connally; and the third hit the president in the head, killing him. But since the Magic Bullet remained intact, it means that the fragments found in Kennedy, Connally and the limousine cannot add up to more than the third bullet fired—otherwise, a fourth or fifth shot was involved, and Oswald only had time to fire three shots. (Hence: case not closed.)

Here, however, are some additional fragments: Governor Connally had a number of bullet fragments removed during surgery and more remained in his wrist; then there are the bullet fragments seen by numerous witnesses in the presidential limousine; plus, surgeons and doctors at the autopsy found more fragments in the president’s head, including a large fragment behind one of his eyes.

CE 399, the Magic Bullet described in the theory. (FBI exhibit.) Warren Commission.

Lastly, there is the recent confession of Secret Service Agent Paul Landis, who was on duty behind the presidential limousine in the motorcade. At Parkland Hospital, he said he picked up a bullet in the back seat of the president’s car [my emphasis], and not knowing what to do with it (clearly not much of an agent), he put the slug on a stretcher inside Parkland Hospital.

If that bullet became the so-called Magic Bullet, and if it was originally found in the back seat, it means that the Magic Bullet did not go through both the president and the governor and end up in the front of the car near or in Connally, but hit the president (probably in the upper back) and fell out into the back seat, invalidating the central premise of the Warren Commission.

When he [Landis] spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another.

I suspect Landis did not want a link to the assassin’s bullet because he was among those agents who the night before stayed up to 5 a.m. partying and drinking, and who (clearly) were not at the top of their security game when it came to protecting the president on his drive through Dallas.

Finally, the Secret Service did the president, and the country, another disservice in removing the body to Washington, where at the very least photographs of the wounds were destroyed, records were doctored, and pathologists conducting the autopsy were browbeaten into coming to the conclusions reached by non-pathologists J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson.

A careful alignment of the possible shots fired and the wounds to both the president and the governor would at least have enabled the Warren Commission to reach a conclusion based on evidence, not the president’s political influence.

In case you’re wondering, Oswald’s rifle is stored inside a building of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, not far from bullet fragments that, when added to those found in Governor Connally, President Kennedy, and the limousine, invalidate the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails; Appalachia Spring; The Revolution as a Dinner Party (China throughout its turbulent twentieth century); Biking with Bismarck (France during the Franco-Prussian War); and Our Man in Iran. Out not long ago were: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and The View From Churchill, about the places that shaped the life of the British wartime prime minister. His next books are Playing in Peoria (by bike across the American Mid-West) and Friends of Kind, a literary travel history of World War I.