JFK Assassination Forum

“the shells at the scene indicate the suspect is armed with an automatic 38 rather than a pistol.”

He claimed that he saw “38” and assumed they were automatics.
A .38 special shell and a .38 automatic are clearly stamped

yet, it sounds like he looked right at them:

“the shells at the scene indicate the suspect is armed with an automatic 38 rather than a pistol.”
  Ducks in a row; thirty years too late

-- Initially, the murder weapon was firmly identified as an automatic pistol, not Oswald's revolver. The person who identified the weapon as an automatic pistol was a Marine combat veteran and an experienced policeman, Sgt. Gerald Hill. Hill based his automatic-pistol identification on the shell casings. As any firearms expert can attest, it is very easy to distinguish between automatic shells and revolver shells. Additionally, in a 1986 interview, Hill said he knew the shells were .38-caliber shells because he picked one of them up and examined it. This is significant because .38 automatic shells are marked ".38 AUTO" on the bottom. Hill specifically said he looked on the bottom of the shell that he examined. It is no wonder, then, that Hill got on the radio and said, "the shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38."

Where does this come from? Can you point to any experiments that support this?

Why is this scenario not possible?:  The FMJ bullet deforms upon striking the skull.  As the bullet penetrates the skull, the part of the bullet behind the nose compresses into the nose.  The back of the WC 6.5 mm bullet is not enclosed so the compression on the nose can cause bits of lead to spill out of the butt-end as the front part of the bullet passes through the skull. (When the bullet is compressed the temperature of the bullet increases so this lead could be in a softened or possibly a liquid state). These bits of lead don't make it through the hole in the skull created by the bullet nose impact so they end up on the outside surface.