Hi John, I totally get why you believe Oswald is carrying his rifle in the bag.
The Back Yard photos are genuine and show Oswald with a Mannlicher-Carcano. It is perfectly reasonable to assume this is the same rifle found on the 6th floor of the TSBD building and that it was Oswald who brought it there.
Oswald finds out JFK will pass the building and decides, for some strange reason, to kill him (even though his sworn enemy, Connally, will be in the motorcade). He keeps his rifle at the Paine house, Marina testifies to seeing a gun stock in a blanket bag in the garage, he has to break his routine and go to the Paine house on Thursday, he collects the rifle (later that day Marina sees that the rifle is no longer in the blanket bag) and he shows up for his ride to work with an unusually long package in which there is something substantial.
I get it.
But the fact remains, both Frazier and, in particular, Randall seem to describe Oswald carrying this package in ways which refute the notion that there is a 34.8 inch object in the bag.
Both of them.
This is the whole point. Eye and ear witnesses are not a reliable way to establish facts. We KNOW that witnesses often get important details wrong. They don't get everything wrong and they can be useful in the gathering of information but it is foolish to accept their statements as factual without corroboration. I am always suspect of any statement that starts out "So-and-so said that..." because without corroboration there is no way to tell for sure if so-and-so is right. In a situation where a witness tells us something that contradicts the forensic evidence, I'm going with the forensic evidence every time.
It is poor methodology to write off their witness statements because the evidence they provide undermines your theory (and it is a theory, never forget that).
I've never said we should write of witness statements. I'm saying we need to determine if what a witness tells us can be corroborated or refuted by other evidence. In this case both Frazier and Randle are refuted by the forensic evidence because the bag was found and measured to be 38 inches long, plenty long enough to hole the 34.8 inch stock. Are we supposed to believe that Oswald brought two bags into the TSBD, the one Frazier and Randle saw and the other one next to the sniper's nest? If you choose to believe that, then we still have the means for Oswald to have smuggled his rifle into the TSBD. I find it far more likely that the two bags were one and the same but if you think it is more likely that Oswald brought two different bags into the TSBD at two different times then that's an argument you need to make.
Frazier might not have been paying special attention to the package but he was fully aware of it and asked Oswald about it. He saw it put on the back seat and he saw Oswald carrying it under his armpit.
He SAID Oswald carried it under his armpit. That doesn't establish that Oswald carried it under his armpit. I will never understand why people choose to put absolute faith in an eyewitness statement that isn't corroborated by physical evidence and in this case is refuted by it.
This puts a limit on how long the object in the package is and it is physically impossible for an object more than 34 inches to be carried in such a way.
It puts no such limit on the objects in the bag unless you can prove Frazier's and Randle's memories and estimates are accurate. Do you have any such proof.
Importantly, Randall corroborates this observation with her own. You don't seem to understand how this is the case.
If one witness can be wrong about something then two people can be wrong. In the case of the earwitnesses in Dealey Plaza, we have two groups which gave mutually exclusive descriptions of where the shots originated from. One group or the other had to be wrong so we have an instance in which a whole lot of people got something very important very wrong.
She describes Oswald holding the package in his right hand by the folded top of the bag acting as a handle. This mean the object is hanging below his hand and just above the ground. If the object in the package was almost 3 feet long it would be dragging across the floor behind him as he walked along. Oswald's physical stature - his height, the length of his arms, the length of his legs, etc. - determines the length of an object being carried in such a way.
Your argument presumes to know at what level Oswald's hand was at when he was holding the bag. Do you have such knowledge? It would make a big deal of difference whether his hand was at waist height, chest height, or somewhere in between.
There are many other issues with this bag that don't sit quite right, not least the fact that he never even needed to construct a bag to carry the rifle as he had his blanket bag with the rifle already in it.
Why would you second guess Oswald's choice when what he did worked?
Personally, the biggest problem I have with the bag is that it is found in the Sniper's Nest which implies Oswald took the disassembled rifle to that spot and assembled it while he was sat in the Sniper's Nest. I don't see how this is possible.
Tell us why it isn't possible.
