‘The second shot was substantially deformed, not “pristine,” and it was found on Conally’s gurney, not Kennedy’s. Other than that, you make good points.’
Not the tip. Yep some odd ‘damage’ to the base of the bullet...curiously found on the gurney, with no blood on it as I seem to recall reading.
I’ve never bought the insistence that was ‘the’ bullet. How often do you find a spent round thats claimed to do so much damange to two human beings, break a bone along the way, and not be the proverbial ‘mushroom shape’ if not worse?
Those of us that shoot know a heavy cardboard ‘backing’ to a paper target will ‘deform’ as in ‘flatten’ the tip of a round. If its a case of the bullet ‘tumbling’...well, that just raises even more questions about the ‘deformation’ or lack thereof.
Just my opinion.
The tip - the front 1/8 to 1/4 inch -- is pretty much intact. Most of the slug is flattened. As far as he "no blood on it," I don't know -- but blood spills are pretty routinely cleaned up as standard ER practice, and any stray blood could have come off on someone's gloves or scrubs.
I’ve never bought the insistence that was ‘the’ bullet. How often do you find a spent round thats claimed to do so much damange to two human beings, break a bone along the way, and not be the proverbial ‘mushroom shape’ if not worse?
How often does someone shoot through a president and hit a governor? 11/22/63 is a statistical anomaly from jump. In tests with various models -- ballistic wax, sides of beef, goat and pig carcasses -- some bullets came out more deformed, some less. No test can match the precise path of the bullet, nor the muscle tone or bone density of the people involved, but the condition of CE 399 is well within the range of likely outcomes.
Those of us that shoot know a heavy cardboard ‘backing’ to a paper target will ‘deform’ as in ‘flatten’ the tip of a round.
A wadcutter, maybe. A jacketed slug, not so much. I do almost all my shooting at the range and not in the field, so usually someone else harvests my lead and brass for later re-use. But I have seen the odd copper-jacketed slug dug out of a berm, and they're remarkably un-deformed.
For that matter, I have a couple of Civil War-era Minnie Balls dug out of a white pine tree and a red clay hillside, and they're less deformed than CE3999. Of course, those had a far slower muzzle velocity, so you don't want to read too much into that.
If its a case of the bullet ‘tumbling’...well, that just raises even more questions about the ‘deformation’ or lack thereof.
And that's what the conspiracy theories do -- they raise questions. They get farcical when they attempt to provide answers. It's when they lay the blame at the feet of the Mob, or the Cubans, or the CIA, or LBJ that it goes from healthy questioning to wild-eyed speculation.