“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........

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