I Couldn't Help It

I was in line to waiting to pick up a prescription and the store's book section is nearby.  Perhaps that's deliberate - it's not the first time this has happened.  Given all the commentary and commemoration, this immediately caught my eye:

It's a really interesting take, stepping away from conspiracy theories and focusing on assassination ballistic evidence and the question of how a total loser like Oswald, using a poor weapon with an even worse scope, managed to kill the 35th president of the United States with a shot to the head that caused the bullet to disintegrate.

One of the theories I've heard was based on time between shots - an insistence that another round simply cannot be chambered and fired in a Mannlicher-Carcano in the time that elapsed between the critical shots.  Don't know - I haven't seen that mentioned in this book.

From a review at JFKfacts:

Hunter’s observations

Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano was an inferior weapon that fired a relatively slow-moving bullet. Hunter doubts it was the murder weapon.

Oswald was not particularly skilled with a gun. Yes, he was rated as a “marksman” in the Marines Corps, but he failed to qualify as an “expert,” the mark of an accomplished shooter.

The bullet that killed JFK disintegrated upon impact in a way that an ordinary Mannlicher-Carcano bullet would not. The official investigations never accounted for this fact.

And in the panicky aftermath of the assassination, Oswald inexplicably returned to his boarding house to fetch a pistol that he could have brought with him to work that morning. What prompted him to suddenly need a firearm? Swagger concludes, correctly I think, that after Kennedy was killed, Oswald knew his life as in danger.

Hunter’s theory

If I read him right, Hunter isn’t actually proposing a conspiracy theory that is Historical Truth. He’s proposing a different way of thinking about JFK. The best way to understand the causes of Kennedy’s death, he suggets, is to reason backwards from the incontrovertible ballistic evidence to the guns that caused it.

Not from assassination evidence, but a good pic...

The sins of the past have risen up to attack lives in the present, and that's where the story begins.

I haven't met Bob Lee Swagger before, and I have to confess that his name is of the sort that can put me off a book.  Dave Robicheaux.  Jack Reacher.  Those are sensible hero names.  Bob Lee is just too close to Billy Bob... I'm afraid I can't read a Dirk Pitt book, either.  I just can't bring myself to read a book in which the lead character is named Dirk Pitt.  But this is an engaging read by a guy who seems to enjoy guns, so I'll probably keep an eye out for others in the series.