Twenty Reasons to Believe Oswald Acted Alone | Hacker News Reader

Twenty Reasons to Believe Oswald Acted Alone

scottaaronson.com

14 pointsclarkm6 comments

A few years back I bought a Carcano, the rifle used in the JFK assassination. I had always remembered every year some "firearms expert" being trotted out and claiming that there was no way that shot could have been made.

I don't think I could reliably make that shot, but a really good shooter could. It is actually a pretty accurate rifle. It is really unreliable though (although that might be just because it is from WW2). So whenever the TV tries to tell you something about firearms, just remember that most news reporters haven't been near anything more powerful than a NERF gun in their entire lives.

An interesting little bit of trivia. Mussolini was a really hard-core atheist, to the point where he even tried to get rid of the Christian year system. And I don't mean just trying to replace BC/AD with BCE/CE, he restarted the calendar at the date in which he took power in Italy. Mine was stamped "1941 XIX", 19 years by Mussolini's count.

An interesting little bit of trivia: in Taiwan the years are still counted since the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party took power in China in 1911, making this year year 102, for example. Oh, and of course they mix it with the "western" years too. So e.g. my birth year of 1980 is occasionally written on documents as 1980, as 80, as 69. Hilarity ensues.

The parallel with Mussolini (ie. being far right as well) is not lost on me, though. Food for thought.

As your Emacs will show you (Meta-x calendar, then p f), the French Republic used a calendar beginning with the revolution. It would be hard to describe the First Republic as "far right".

And I noticed on co-worker's diploma that Syracuse University gives the year both AD and from the founding of the republic--but whether counting that from independence or from the constitution I don't remember.

One of the facts that is not widely appreciated -- unless you have visited the site of the assassination -- is just how short a distance we're talking about. I remember thinking that it couldn't have been more than about a hundred yards. According to Wikipedia, the distance from the sixth story window to where Kennedy was when he was shot in the head is 265 feet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_r...)

I have also experienced this conspiracy bug. It was when I was young and "fake moon landing" was on the rise. What put an end to my belief it was staged was a simple fact that there are mirrors on the moon for anyone to check for reflection. Yet all the conspiracy theories conveniently left this fact out.

Marc Ambinder's "How I figured out that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK" (http://theweek.com/article/index/253249/my-journey-to-unbeli...) is worth a read as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com