Clearly you were a good honest scout....Brian. Honesty is something that is sorely lacking in these discussions about the murder of President Kennedy.
And I wanted to tell you that you're quite right in saying:.... "I think accurately hitting a non-stationary target with any appreciable motion would be hard to do without decent knowledge of the target's speed and quite a bit of practice".
And you probably know that Lee Oswald had no practice at all... Even in the Marine Corp ( 4 years earlier) he never was taught how to hit a moving target....
Oswald had no practice at hitting a moving target. As is true of all Marines who go through basic training. Clearly, it is not practical to train thousands of recruits at once how to do so. Even so, Marines have proven effective at hitting moving targets. During World War II, Marines, just to survive, had to hit charging Japanese soldiers. Both when the enemy was charging directly toward them, giving a target with an angular velocity of zero degrees per second, and when firing at enemies that are charging a neighboring section of the line, giving a target with a non-zero angular velocity. Clearly becoming very good at hitting stationary targets allows one to be at least fairly good at hitting a moving target. Good enough to survive World War II combat.
And I am certain that Gunnery Drill Sergeants would have given Oswald and the other recruits advice on how to hit a moving target, to lead the target by an appropriate amount, although it was not practicable to shoot at real moving targets during training.
Again, according to my calculations, the angular velocity of a moving target was:
3.2 degrees per second, for the Olympic 1908 Running Deer competition.
4.8 degrees per second, for Oswald’s first shot at z-153, which missed the limousine.
1.9 degrees per second, for Oswald’s second shot at z-222, which wounded both Kennedy and Connally.
0.58 degrees per second, for Oswald’s third shot at z-312, which killed Kennedy.
Yes, when Oswald attempted a shot that was more difficult than the shots the best shooters in the world could make in 1908, he failed. As one would expect. But at a target with a much lower angular velocity, 1.9 degrees per second and 0.58 degrees per second, he made accurate shots. I know of no shooting tests that show someone with Marine training cannot be expected to make these shots. Although if anyone has more data on this, I would like to hear about it.
And I neglected to mention that there was a tree in full foliage between the sixth floor window and the moving Lincoln. What do you believe the odds are for hitting a target with deadly accuracy if the moving target is obscured by a tree?
While the HSCA favored a shot attempted while the tree blocked the shot at z-186, this position was never embraced by the LN community. I don’t think you can name a single LNer on this forum who believes in this scenario. The current LN position, which has been held for over thirty years, is that none of the shots were attempted while the tree blocked the line of sight. The first shot, at z-153 was attempted before the tree blocked the line of sight. The second and third shots were made afterwards. JFK cleared the tree totally by around z-206. Oswald would have had a clear view for 0.9 seconds before the shot at z-222.
