Glenda Bixler --

 

I met John Craig through his book, Peculiar Liaisons in War,Espionage, and Terrorism of the Twentieth Century and Heroes, Rogues and Spies. I confess that I enjoyed both those books much better than this one. But that doesn't detract from the recognition of this writer's skill in research, presentation, and an overall excellent thought-provoking book, this time honing in on the Kennedy Assassination. For historians, for forensics gun enthusiasts, for those who enjoy conspiracy theories, The Guns of Dealey Plaza is a investigative resource that you will want to check out.

This is a non-fiction, technical, very detailed review of the guns that were involved, or at least studied, found in November, 1963. Readers will not find excitement--they will find detailed facts and/or hypotheses of what happened. But mostly it is information about the guns used/found... and the investigation surrounding the assassination.

I was working on my first job, in the Office of Personnel, at WVU, when we heard the news about what was happening in Texas. The assassination of the President was something that would never be forgotten, or, it seems, studied. Will that help prevent a future disaster? Or, perhaps, "not" since being able to purchase a gun through the mail for less than $15 says more about that??? And still does...

One part interested me when Craig discussed that Oswald's competency in shooting was "maligned..." Then proceeds on to discuss the witnesses as they discuss whether he was skilled, more skilled...or even more skilled, of course, using the correct military terms... After reading that, I began to wonder about my own interest in forensics science television...My thought was, if they proved he killed him, why argue how skilled Oswald was...so what if it was just "luck?" The President was still dead...Right?

Included in the book is information about the bullets and shells, handguns, the timing of the shots, etc., and, of course, the government agencies and The Warren Commission that worked on the case. In any event, you will see that many aspects of the entire investigation has been included, regurgitated, and, in the end, Craig provides "A Possible Scenario" of how he sees everything happening and then an Afterword which included some interesting details...I found these most interesting as a conclusion before I went on to review the extensive sources and end notes documenting the research conducted and footnoting exactly what came from where...

The format of the book is much like I've read in university dissertations and should be easily used by students and others who are conducting research on the same or similar topics. It is exceptionally well done... And I want to point out that this is an excellent illustration of the quality and content that can be found in today's self-publishing world. Kudos to the author!

I would be remiss in saying that I would not buy this book since I have no interest in guns. This book format, style of writing, etc., are very similar to my experience with a scholarly study. And I have no doubt that members of the NRA should check this one out...

GABixlerReviews
Paperback provided for Review

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A. Zarkov --

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With the possible exception of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the assassination of John Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, is the most famous murder in history, and certainly the most thoroughly investigated. Though the putative assassin was himself gunned down in bizarre circumstances only a day later and never stood trial, a presidential commission was immediately convened to establish the facts of the case, and summarized its conclusions in twenty-seven volumes which have rarely been read, and less often believed.

Indeed whole forests have been cleared to print the subsequent literature, which has cast doubt upon the identity of the murderer, his status as an independent actor, his motivation or lack of it, what weapons were employed, how many shots were fired and from where, who saw and heard (even smelled) what, who told the truth and who was lying. The resulting hermeneutic chaos was succinctly summarized by the satirical organ The Onion in their historical compendium Our Dumb Century with the headline “Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons; President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles.”

It is the conclusion, however, of John Craig’s meticulously researched and impeccably reasoned analysis that the original account was essentially correct: Oswald was the lone gunman; three shots were fired in an interval of between 8 and 11 seconds; the first missed; the second struck both Kennedy and Connally; the third was fatal; the rest is bulls***.

Mr. Craig’s principal characters, are, as his title suggests, guns. The chief protagonist is Oswald’s Model 91/38 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle — which was, incredibly, obtained by mail order under an assumed name (technological progress would now probably allow it to be 3D printed from open source specs available on Libertarian websites); other players include one or more 7.65 millimeter Mausers, a Johnson semiautomatic 30.06, an AR-15 .223 automatic, a British Enfield .303, a Winchester .220 Swift, and the snub-nose .38 pistol Oswald used to kill a police officer.

It is a subject of debate (of course) whether Oswald’s rifle could easily have been assembled using a dime as a screwdriver; Mr. Craig addresses this issue. The bolt action was slow, the firing pin defective, and the scope misaligned; Mr. Craig addresses these issues as well. He examines ballistics, summarizing laboratory experiments and computer simulations which account for the medical and forensic evidence (notably the observed distribution of bullet fragments); parses the acoustical evidence to explain the confusion caused by echoes in the plaza, the sonic booms of supersonic bullets as they passed their auditors, and the misinterpretation of a police dictabelt recording; explains the use of the Zapruder film to index jiggle/blur and startle reflex analyses and construct a consistent timeline; notes that advances in psychology (confirmed by what the study of artificial intelligence has learned about pattern recognition) have shown that eye-witness accounts, particularly of stressful events, which have a dramatically deleterious effect upon brain chemistry, are inherently suspect, and that, as now-ubiquitous video recording has made obvious, memories are almost always edited after the fact; derives a consensus nonetheless from the conflicting reports of many dozens of witnesses; and makes only sparing use of adjectives like “ridiculous”, “fantastic”, “amazing”, “incredible”, and “grossly illogical” in dispelling the myth of the grassy knoll and discussing the assorted legends of Dog Man, Umbrella Man, Railroad Man, Badge Man, and Sewer Man. (He does not, so far as I know, comment on the theory that the twisted trajectory of the second bullet was the result of an attempt by Magneto of the X-Men to deflect it, but I admit I haven’t read all 402 footnotes.)

In short, though we can expect in the near future that advances in computer simulation will permit a complete virtual-reality recreation of the events in Dealey Plaza (though for obvious reasons it was universally condemned, the 2004 first-person shooter video game JFK: Reloaded could be regarded as a crude first draft), and that this will be used to provide a mathematically rigorous assessment of the probabilities involved — were the shots as difficult as skeptics have claimed? should Oswald have been expected to succeed, or was he freakishly lucky? is the physical evidence completely consistent with the scenario Mr. Craig endorses? — the likely answers are known. The physical facts seem well established.

Unfortunately knowing what happened still doesn’t tell us why, and the psychological mystery remains. The opaque banality of Oswald, the blankness of the man that made him impossible to read, suggests the tabula rasa, the mental empty slate of the British empiricists, and the temptation to suppose someone else was writing upon it is irresistible. But once we begin with such speculation, there is (see Ellroy, Mailer, DeLillo, Oliver Stone) no way to stop.

So here again probability must be our guide. If Oswald was a witless boob and an inconsistent marksman, this is just the proof we need he acted alone: if the Illuminati had wanted Kennedy dead, they would have chosen a more impressive instrument. — Again, though Mr. Craig does not quote Karl Popper explicitly, it is clear that the theme of falsifiability as the hallmark of scientific theory is dear to his heart: assertions which by definition cannot be disproved are meaningless, no matter that they’re guaranteed to make the bestseller lists.

Thus we have to accept, as conspiracy theorists cannot, that on some occasions history really is shaped by bad luck, blind chance, and the perverse whims of twisted individual actors, and that this was almost certainly one of them. Achilles, the greatest warrior of antiquity, was killed beneath the walls of Troy by the feckless gigolo Paris with a bow and arrow; pace Homer, that made no sense. John Kennedy, the most gifted and charismatic of our postwar leaders, was killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald with a mail-order rifle. And there was no reason.

Today such a catastrophe could not take place without being recorded on thousands of iPhones; the sheer mass of data would demand huge investments in hardware and software to process it all, but there would never be any doubt where the shots came from, or how many there were; Oswald himself would be photographed, rifle still in hand, by dozens of cameras as their owners turned to look back at the repository; all ambiguity would be dispelled. In Dallas in 1963, however, there was only one 8-millimeter enthusiast who, to his lasting regret, found himself in the right place at the wrong time. Somehow the saddest thing I carry away from this rigorous and unfailingly objective dissertation on the grimmest of subjects is Mr. Craig’s parenthetical remark that, after the experience that made him famous, Abraham Zapruder never touched a camera again. But then, how could he.