JFK - The Smoking Gun

[Rollo]

There's a documentary which will be shown on Discovery in the US, which has already been shown by SBS in Australia which suggests that JFK was accidentally shot by someone in the security detail car following the president's car.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/boo ... z2jdHUQDIN (http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/riding-shotgun-20131014-2vhbr.html#ixzz2jdHUQDIN)
It goes like this: the secret service agents detailed to ride shotgun on the motorcade through Dallas went out drinking the night before. When the first shot, from Oswald's gun, freakishly caught the president in the throat, the agents were slow and heavy to respond.
One of the agents riding in the follow-up Cadillac - the car behind the Lincoln Continental carrying Mr and Mrs Kennedy - had an AR-15 assault rifle loaded with hollow-point bullets. The agent, George Hickey, had little experience with this weapon. In the confusion following that first shot, Hickey, awkwardly sitting on the head-rest of the rear seat, and jolted by the car's lurching to a halt, fumbled for the gun. And - oops - it went off.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Oct 2013

I think that the documentary lays out a pretty good case that this whole thing was a giant mistake and certainly there would want to be a cover up because this might have resulted in serious charges being laid. Certainly Hickey had a rifle and there are photographs which show such:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/images/volkland.jpg

What'd clinch this is if there are other films around other that Zapruder's. Zapruder's film is only looking at the President's car when the shot hit and shows nothing of the car following at all.

[555-04Q2]

I wonder if the conspiracy theories around this incident will ever abate?

[D-Type]

I'm one of the generation who 'can always remember what they were doing when they heard the news that JFK had been shot' . The point being that the news came as such a shock that we couldn't believe it. We then had the strange business of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. This led to a feeling that we weren't being told the full story.

And people began to ask questions like:
Could Oswald have fired three shots that rapidly with the gun he had?
Did the trajectory of all 3 shots correspond to them all coming from the Book Depository?
Who stood to gain from JFK's death?
Who stood to gain from Oswald's death?
Did the film show a gunman on the mound?
Why didn't they have the clear glass canopy on the car that day?
etc.

For some people, once the doubt sets in, it keeps gnawing away.
And this latest theory is merely another possible answer to the half-formed questions.

I'll be interested to see the documentary and in the intellectual exercise of asking myself where they are glossing over inconvenient facts. This is difficult as I'm not au fait with all the published facts and theories.

[Rollo]

For some people, once the doubt sets in, it keeps gnawing away.
And this latest theory is merely another possible answer to the half-formed questions.

I'll be interested to see the documentary and in the intellectual exercise of asking myself where they are glossing over inconvenient facts. This is difficult as I'm not au fait with all the published facts and theories.

Colin McLaren who wrote the book (and this documentary) was an ex-homicide detective with the Victorian Police who rose as high as Assistant Commissioner. He explains in the opening chapter that he treated the original source material as though it was still and open cold case.

The first two of those questions, are dealt with in the documentary.
Could Oswald have fired three shots that rapidly with the gun he had?
Did the trajectory of all 3 shots correspond to them all coming from the Book Depository

I think that the theory that this presents, in the light of there not being another useful piece of film other than Zapruder's, is both logical and fits the facts.