CTers: Do yourself a favor and focus on plausibility

[Lance Payette]

This old recreation of the Discovery Channel's "Beyond the Magic Bullet," which ended up with the bullet going Where It's Not Supposed to Go (i.e., JFK's sternum), recently received some discussion at the Ed Forum.

I also noticed that Larry Schnapf, who works closely with John Orr, says Orr's latest work shows the Mafia bullet being fired from the County Records building. You may recall that Orr sponsored the Knott Lab study of the bullet trajectories but then rejected the results (not because they confirmed the SBT, because they didn't).

Mafia! Mafia! Mafia! 

[John Corbett]

It is absurd to think any shooting can be perfectly replicated because there are so many variables involved. For starters, you would need to shoot the same two men who were originally shot, have them in precisely the same position they were in at the time the single bullet struck, and have the shot placed precisely where the original shot struck. Good luck with that. Any deviation is going to produce different results. Elements of the SBT can be tested and have been. We know the 6.5mm round fired by Oswald's Carcano is capable of penetrating 3 feet of pine board as demonstrated for the PBS Nova program by the father/son ballistics team of Luke and Michael Haag. The also showed that a Carcano bullet passing through ballistic gel simulating human flesh will predictably tumble upon exit. This explains why the nose of the bullet was not severely damaged because it was the base of the bullet which was flattened.

You aren't focusing on plausibility when you expect a shooting to be perfectly replicated.