Tom Graves asked: "Doesn't splaying one's elbows outwards like that seem to be a strange way to react to not being able to breathe? Doesn't it seem to be more of a neuromuscular reaction?"
No Is there only one way to react when a person feels they are choking or gasping for air?
It could be a voluntary action or natural response prompted by realizing something is wrong - like a feeling he is choking. The brain does have a strong physical response to being unable to breathe. The arms and upper body often move and press against the chest to try to get oxygen into the lungs:
“When someone is very breathless they tend to breathe from the top of their chest. This is a normal thing to do when breathless whether you are an athlete at the end of a race or someone who has a medical condition that makes them feel breathless. When you breathe from the top of your chest you are using the breathing accessory muscles. These are muscles around your upper chest and shoulders that usually move your arms. When you are very breathless these muscles can pull on your ribs and help with breathing."
ME: Is JFK's splaying his elbows outwards and "clutching at his throat" more likely due to his not being able to breathe, or his neuromuscular reaction to having his spinal cord damaged by the bullet that exited his neck?Perplexity AI: We can’t know with certainty, but based on the medical and film evidence, his initial arm/elbow splay is more plausibly a neuromuscular response to cervical/spinal trauma, while his overall distressed, frozen posture is also consistent with severe airway compromise. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you force a choice, the spinal/neurologic mechanism better fits the speed, symmetry, and “locked” quality of the movement.
1. What the spinal‑injury (Thorburn‑type) explanation says
Lattimer and colleagues argued that the first bullet:
Entered high in the back, passed through the neck, and brushed the C‑6 transverse process, sending a concussive force into the spinal cord at that level.
X‑rays showed small bone fragments near C‑6 supporting a grazing injury.
This trauma produced an involuntary spasm in the arm flexors, causing the elbows to jerk upward and the forearms to rise in front of the chest/neck—an “almost classic” Thorburn position.
Key points for your question:
The elbows elevate suddenly and symmetrically, within a few Zapruder frames (fractions of a second) after the presumed impact.
The posture then persists for several seconds, gradually sagging but never transforming into active, searching hand movements.
That pattern—abrupt, bilateral arm flexion that “locks in” and then slowly sags—is exactly what proponents cite as evidence of a spinal/neuromuscular mechanism rather than a conscious attempt to clutch or rub the throat.
2. How an airway‑distress explanation would look
A pure “I can’t breathe” reaction should have somewhat different characteristics:
You would expect variable, searching hand movements—hands moving to the front of the throat, mouth, or chest, then repositioning as the subject tries to clear the airway.
The movement could be asymmetric or uncoordinated, depending on pain and panic.
The arms would likely not snap up in a tight, symmetric flexion within a tiny fraction of a second; there is normally a brief latency as the person processes pain and dyspnea and then chooses to grab the affected area.
We know from Parkland testimony and later analyses that the bullet did damage his trachea and could severely compromise breathing. So airway distress was almost certainly present. But the specific elbow‑splaying, arms‑up posture in the film is not what you typically see as a conscious “I’m choking” gesture.
3. How official and medical reviews lean
Several strands of evidence pull toward a neurologic/spinal component:
The HSCA medical panel and later neurologically oriented discussions accept that the back/head motions after the head shot can be neuromuscular in origin, i.e., seizure‑like “violent straightening and stiffening” of the body after central nervous system trauma. That makes neuromuscular explanations for earlier reactions at least conceptually acceptable in official circles.
Lattimer’s C‑6–injury paper explicitly ties the upward jerk of Kennedy’s flexed elbows between Z‑225–235 to “stimulation of C‑6,” and calls the resulting arm posture an “almost classic demonstration” of a Thorburn position.
No major forensic or neurological review has produced a strong, film‑based counter‑model showing that the arm movement is better explained solely by voluntary choking‑type behavior; most critiques focus on whether it is a strict Thorburn case, not on denying that neuromuscular reflexes could be doing a lot of the work.
At the same time, trauma surgeons and neurologists acknowledge that a neck wound in that region can both interfere with breathing and perturb the phrenic and vagus nerves. It’s plausible that he simultaneously:
Experienced severe dyspnea and loss of phonation (explaining his silent, frozen look), and
Exhibited a spinal‑mediated arm flexion response.
4. Weighing the two mechanisms for your specific question
If you frame it as a binary — “more likely due to breathing difficulty or spinal neuromuscular reaction?”— the evidence leans like this:
For spinal/neuromuscular:
Instantaneous, symmetric elbow rise and forearm flexion within a few frames of impact.
Persistence of a relatively fixed posture, with only gradual sagging.
Consistency with a C‑6 concussive injury and previously described Thorburn‑type arm patterns.
For airway distress alone:
The bullet definitely injured his trachea, so he would feel choking and be unable to speak.
However, the exact pattern of arm motion is not a textbook volitional choking response; it looks too instantaneous, symmetric, and sustained.
On balance, the pattern of his arms and elbows is better accounted for by a neuromuscular response to cervical/spinal trauma, with airway compromise and pain providing the overall context of distress, rather than by conscious “clutching at his throat” because he couldn’t breathe.
