Three Guns That Changed America
These three guns fundamentally changed the
landscape of American gun culture.
Every generation has its own seminal moment. You never forget where you were when you heard the news. In my grandparents’ case that was the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. For folks my age it was 9/11. American adults alive in 1963 found their seminal moment in the brutal assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
There are several reasons for this. Thankfully, American Presidential assassinations are fairly rare. There have only been four — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and Kennedy. In JFK’s case, the whole sordid thing was also filmed in gory detail. The man got his brains blown out in public whilst sitting alongside his pretty young wife. This, plus the fact even today, nobody seems to be completely satisfied with the government’s version of who did it.
Three men ultimately perished. JFK was obviously the target. His presumed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed a Dallas patrolman named JD Tippit 45 minutes later while on the run. Oswald was subsequently gunned down by a local mobster named Jack Ruby. Bob Johnson’s iconic photograph of a grimacing Oswald just as Ruby touched off his modified Colt Cobra won the Pulitzer Prize.
These three killings involved three different firearms. Each had a quirky story. Here are the details.
For a few days at least, Lee Harvey Oswald was the most hated man in America. Photo: U.S. Government
The Shooter
Lee Harvey Oswald was a weird guy. He burned through 22 addresses and a dozen schools before he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at age 17. While serving as a Marine, he accidentally shot himself in the elbow with a contraband .22-caliber handgun and was disciplined for firing his M1 rifle into the Philippine jungle while on guard duty.
In 1959 after his discharge, Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union and attempted to secure Soviet citizenship. When the skeptical Russians refused, Oswald slit his wrists. He survived and went on to marry a Russian woman named Marina Prusakova. Three years later, a disillusioned Oswald returned to the States with his bride.
The Carcano 91/30 purportedly used by Oswald to kill JFK
was actually a pretty craptastic rifle. Photo: U.S. Government
The Rifle
We have Lee Harvey Oswald to thank for the 1968 Gun Control Act. The 68 GCA transformed gun ownership in America. Prior to that law, firearms could be freely bought and sold through the mail and need not even bear a serial number.
It was the GCA that established our familiar system of Federal Firearms Licensees. Oswald bought the assassination rifle under the alias “A. J. Hidell” via an ad in the back of the American Rifleman magazine. He had the weapon shipped to a P.O. box.
The advertisement actually listed the gun as a “6.5 Italian Carbine.” The illustrated weapon was a bolt-action Carcano Model 91 TS. However, Klein’s Sporting Goods had been unable to source this specific model. They replaced it with the very similar Model 91/38. Oswald’s 91/38 has a slightly longer barrel and left-sided sling mounts. Those of the TS are usually, but not always, mounted on the bottom. The two guns were otherwise nearly indistinguishable in dim light.
Oswald gave $19.95 for his Italian surplus 91/38 complete with a civilian optic mounted by the distributor. This would be about $195 today. The same rifle without the scope was $12.78. He paid $1.50 in shipping.
Oswald’s 91/38 Carcano was originally built in 1940 in Terni, Italy. It fired a Winchester Western 160-grain 6.5x52mm round-nosed cartridge and fed from a six-round en bloc clip. The 4X sight was produced by a company called Ordnance Optics. The serial number of the gun was C2766.
Roughly two weeks after taking possession of the weapon, Lee Harvey Oswald used it to try to kill white supremacist U.S. Army General Edwin Walker. Oswald attempted to shoot the segregationist military officer in his home, but the WWI-vintage round-nosed bullet deflected off of a window frame.
If the government report is to be believed, Oswald subsequently set up in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and fired a total of three rounds as JFK’s vehicle passed by. Three empty cases were later found with the abandoned rifle. The average range was about 265 feet. One round passed through the president’s neck and was potentially survivable. Another took much of his head off. The third was never definitively accounted for.
In the hands of a skilled marksman, Oswald’s 91/38 rifle was fully capable of the kind of performance demanded of it that horrible day. However, subsequent firing trials with the actual weapon showed its zero to be 2.5″ high and 1″ right when fired from a rest at 15 meters. Most bystanders reported hearing either three or four shots.
Dabbs found this cool aluminum hammer shroud online (left). Mounting it up required drilling and tapping the frame, but he did so by hand with a cheap drill press.
Dabbs found this cool aluminum hammer shroud online.
The Escape
Lee Harvey Oswald fled the scene and was later confronted by Officer Tippit who was acting on a physical description of the JFK shooter. JD was Tippit’s actual first name. The letters didn’t stand for anything. Tippit had earned the Bronze Star for Valor while serving as a paratrooper in Europe during World War II and had three kids.
Oswald was carrying a snub-nosed Smith and Wesson .38 Victory Model he had also purchased under an alias through the mail. Without warning, he shot the cop in the chest, belly and head. Tippit was declared dead 10 minutes later in a nearby hospital. Oswald was apprehended in short order. It was not until later that he was officially tied to the JFK shooting.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s handgun was presumably a British Lend-Lease S&W Victory Model in .38/200 rechambered to .38 Special with a cut-down barrel. These modifications made it difficult to get a ballistic match on the rounds that killed Officer JD Tippit.
Comparison (L-R) — The 5.56x45mm, the Italian 6.5x52mm
and the 7.62x51mm. The round-nosed 160-grain WWI-vintage
6.5x52mm bullets were undeniably horrific downrange.
Vengeance
Oswald vigorously denied any involvement in the killings of either JD Tippit or the President. However, his palm print was found underneath the furniture on the Carcano, and the eyewitnesses tying him to the Tippit shooting were compelling. Two days after the murders, Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas Police headquarters to the County jail under heavy police escort.
Local nightclub owner and mobster Jack Ruby was a frequent visitor to police HQ. His presence aroused little suspicion. It has actually been postulated that Ruby might have been welcome for having habitually supplied loose women to some of the cops.
Without warning, Ruby lunged forward, shoved his Colt Cobra .38-caliber pocket revolver into Oswald’s belly and fired. That single round perforated Oswald’s stomach, spleen, aorta, inferior vena cava, kidney, liver and diaphragm. It ultimately stopped on the far side against his 11th rib. Oswald bled out in short order.
Ruby paid $62.50 for the Colt Cobra on January 19th, 1960 at Ray’s Sporting Goods in Dallas. A cop buddy named Joe Cody had recommended he get the gun given the large amounts of cash he handled in the course of running his strip joint, the Carousel Club.
Cody actually bought the gun for his mobster buddy as a straw purchaser because cops did not have to pay tax on firearms purchases. Cody and Ruby subsequently exchanged both the money and the gun outside the shop. Having the cop buy the piece saved Ruby $18.
Ruby was immediately arrested. He claimed he spontaneously shot Oswald to “save Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial.” Ruby subsequently developed disseminated cancer while in prison and died in 1967 at age 55. His actions and subsequent death have provided fodder for countless conspiracy theories.
Ruby’s snub-nosed Cobra was stock save for its curious aluminum hammer shroud. The shroud still allowed the hammer to be manually cocked but did make the gun much less likely to snag on loose clothing. There followed a 24-year legal fight over ownership of the weapon. In 1991 the gun was sold at auction for $220,000. The new owner sold fired bullets out of it for $1,000 apiece to fund his favorite charities. The pistol was confiscated by Capitol Hill police after being carried in D.C. illegally but was finally returned after yet another long legal battle. The owner subsequently sold it yet again, but I was unable to locate a reliable price.
The moment Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald was captured by photographer Bob Johnson. The image earned him a Pulitzer Prize.Photo: Public Domain
Ruminations
A local clothier named Abraham Zapruder captured everything on his home movie camera, establishing the specific timeline of the shooting. His is the most scrutinized motion picture in human history.
In 1999, the U.S. government paid Zapruder’s heirs $16 million to incorporate the footage into the National Archives. That works out to $615,384 per second. In all of American history, little has been more controversial than the JFK assassination.
Conspiracy theorists question absolutely everything and become angry just talking about it even today. What is not in dispute, however, is that these three guns did fundamentally change the American political landscape.
