Lee Harvey Oswald’s Rifle: Purchase, Ballistics, and Evidence

The rifle Lee Harvey Oswald used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a 6.5-millimeter Italian Mannlicher-Carcano Model 91/38 bolt-action carbine, serial number C2766, which he had bought by mail order from a Chicago sporting goods store earlier that year. Two federal investigations — the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 — concluded that Oswald owned the weapon and fired it from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Fingerprints, fibers, photographs, ballistic matches, and a documented purchase trail all tied the rifle to him.

The Weapon

The Carcano was a clip-fed military surplus rifle, 40.2 inches long and weighing about eight pounds. It was manufactured and test-fired at the Terni Army Arms Plant in Italy in 1940 and carried the markings “CAL. 6.5,” “MADE ITALY,” and the serial number C2766. The barrel had four spiral grooves of rifling, and the action accepted a six-round en-bloc clip.¹ The Carcano family had served as the Italian military’s standard infantry arm through both world wars.²

A Japanese-made four-power telescopic sight was side-mounted on the receiver in a stamped sheet-metal bracket. It bore the markings “4 x 18 COATED” and “ORDNANCE OPTICS INC. HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA,” and its crosshairs were slightly off-center.¹ A gunsmith at Klein’s Sporting Goods installed the scope before the rifle shipped.³ The sling was improvised from two leather straps that looked like they had been taken from a musical instrument or camera bag, and investigators noted it was too short for ordinary use.

How Oswald Bought It

Oswald ordered the rifle using a coupon clipped from American Rifleman. He filled it out under the alias “A. Hidell” and listed his P.O. Box 2915 in Dallas. The total was $21.45: $19.95 for the rifle plus $1.50 for postage. Handwriting experts identified the coupon and the money order as his.³ Klein’s Sporting Goods assigned the order internal control number VC836 and shipped the rifle on March 20, 1963.⁴

The “Hidell” alias was not a one-off. The Warren Commission documented Oswald’s use of the same name on a forged vaccination certificate and Selective Service cards, tying him to the identity used on the rifle order.³

Evidence Connecting Oswald to the Rifle

Palmprint and Fibers

Lieutenant J. C. Day of the Dallas Police Department lifted a right palmprint from the underside of the barrel, in an area covered by the wooden foregrip when the rifle is assembled. The Warren Commission concluded Oswald must have left the print while the weapon was taken apart. FBI analysts also recovered a tuft of cotton fibers wedged in a crevice between the butt plate and the stock. The fibers were dark blue, gray-black, and orange-yellow, and matched the color, shade, and twist of the shirt Oswald was wearing when he was arrested.³

The Backyard Photographs

Two snapshots taken by Marina Oswald in early 1963 at the couple’s Neely Street apartment show Oswald holding the Carcano in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other, with a pistol on his hip. FBI photography experts confirmed one of the negatives had been exposed in Oswald’s own Imperial Reflex camera.³ After his arrest, Oswald claimed the pictures were composites with his head pasted onto someone else’s body.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations examined the images in the late 1970s. Its forensic photography panel matched unique frame-edge scratches on the prints to test photos from Oswald’s camera, found that stereoscopic viewing of the two photos produced a consistent three-dimensional image, and reported no evidence of tampering.⁵ A 2015 Dartmouth study built a 3-D model of Oswald’s pose and concluded the stance was physically stable and that the lighting, shadows, and rifle length were all consistent with an authentic image.⁶

From a Garage in Irving to the Depository

From late September 1963 until the morning of the assassination, the rifle sat wrapped in a green and brown blanket on the floor of Ruth Paine’s garage in Irving, Texas, where Marina Oswald was living. Marina had seen the rifle stock inside the blanket while looking for crib parts. Michael Paine had moved the rolled-up bundle on several occasions, assuming it held camping gear.³

On the evening of November 21, Oswald made an unusual weeknight visit to Irving, saying he needed curtain rods. An FBI firearms expert later testified the Carcano could be disassembled quickly with only a ten-cent coin. The next morning, Linnie Mae Randle saw Oswald carrying a brown paper bag roughly 28 inches long to her brother Buell Wesley Frazier’s car. Oswald told Frazier the package held curtain rods. The Commission rejected that explanation: Oswald’s Dallas rooming house already had curtains, Ruth Paine’s curtain rods were still in her garage after the arrest, and a handmade brown paper bag found near the sixth-floor window was linked to the rifle through fiber and residue analysis. Police found the garage blanket still tied with string but empty, with a bulge about ten inches long consistent with the telescopic sight.³

Ballistics

Three spent 6.5-millimeter cartridge cases were recovered on the sixth floor of the Depository. Firearms examiners determined all three had been fired from the Carcano serial C2766. A nearly intact bullet, Commission Exhibit 399, was recovered from a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital, and two bullet fragments were taken from the presidential limousine. Both CE 399 and the fragments were ballistically matched to Oswald’s rifle.⁷

Neutron activation analysis performed for the HSCA found it “highly likely” that CE 399 caused Governor John Connally’s wrist wound and that fragments from the president’s brain and the limousine floor came from a second bullet. The testing turned up no evidence of a third bullet among the fragments large enough to analyze. Because the rifle had been test-fired extensively after 1963, barrel wear meant later test rounds no longer matched the original evidence, but the stored evidence bullets did match the FBI’s 1964 test firings.⁷

In 2019, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology used focus-variation and confocal microscopy to make high-resolution 3-D surface maps of CE 399 and the other assassination-related bullet fragments at a horizontal resolution of four micrometers. The project was a preservation effort rather than a new forensic analysis, but it means the rifling marks and surface detail are now permanently recorded.⁸

Could Oswald Shoot It Well Enough, Fast Enough?

Oswald’s U.S. Marine Corps rifle score book, Warren Commission Exhibit 239, records that on December 21, 1956, he scored 212 out of a possible 250. Under the Marine system, 190 qualified as “marksman,” 210 as “sharpshooter,” and 220 as “expert.” Oswald earned sharpshooter. On three individual stages — 200-yard rapid fire, 300-yard rapid fire, and 500-yard slow fire — he scored 46 of 50 on each, above the 44-point threshold for expert-level performance in those stages. The Warren Commission relied on these scores in concluding Oswald “possessed the capability with a rifle which enabled him to commit the assassination.”⁹ Marina Oswald testified he dry-fired the rifle at home, working the bolt while sighting through the scope.³ In a 1967 CBS News investigation, some fellow Marines gave a different picture, describing Oswald as a “very poor shot” with little enthusiasm for marksmanship.¹⁰

Timing was tested too. The Warren Commission put the Carcano’s minimum interval between shots at about 2.25 to 2.3 seconds, meaning three rounds using the telescopic sight could not be fired in less than roughly 4.6 seconds.¹¹ The original FBI and military tests used stationary targets.¹⁰

CBS News replicated the scenario in 1967 with a tower matching the sixth-floor height and a target moving on a track at 11 miles per hour. Eleven volunteer marksmen fired an identical Carcano. Of 37 attempts, 17 were voided for rifle malfunctions. Across the 20 successful runs, the average time for three shots was 5.6 seconds. The fastest attempt, 4.1 seconds by a laboratory technician, produced only one hit; a weapons engineer landed three hits in 5.2 seconds.¹⁰

The HSCA ran its own tests. Preliminary firings in September 1978 suggested the rifle could be cycled and fired in 1.65 to 1.75 seconds using the open iron sights instead of the scope. In formal tests on March 29, 1979, four expert marksmen and two committee staff tried to fire two consecutive shots within 1.66 seconds, the interval implied by acoustical evidence. None of the experts hit the mark. Staff members made the time only by “point aiming” without using any sights.¹¹

What the Two Investigations Concluded

The Warren Commission reported in September 1964 that Oswald acted alone, firing three shots from the Carcano, based on the purchase chain, the fingerprint and fiber evidence, the ballistic matches, and the trajectory analysis placing the shots at the sixth-floor window.³

The HSCA reported in 1979 that Oswald fired three shots from the Depository and that the second and third struck the president. It upheld the single-bullet theory and confirmed that Oswald owned the rifle.¹² Where it broke from the Warren Commission was on conspiracy. Based on acoustical analysis of a Dallas Police dictabelt recording, the committee concluded with “95-percent probability” that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll by a second, unidentified gunman, and that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Three committee members dissented, citing the gap between the 1.66-second interval the acoustical evidence required and the mechanical limits of the Carcano.¹¹ A National Academy of Sciences panel later found a “multitude of errors” in the acoustical analysis and concluded the recorded sounds occurred about a minute after the shooting and were not gunshots.¹³

What Is Still Disputed

The Carcano remains at the center of most conspiracy theories about the assassination. Skeptics have questioned whether a cheap military surplus rifle with an off-center scope could have produced the shots attributed to it, and the “magic bullet” theory — that CE 399 passed through both Kennedy and Connally while staying largely intact — continues to draw scrutiny. In 2023, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis said he had found a bullet on the limousine’s back seat and later placed it on a stretcher at Parkland, an account that could complicate the chain of evidence for CE 399.¹⁴ Claims that the rifle on the sixth floor was a different weapon, or that the backyard photographs were doctored, have been rejected by the HSCA’s forensic panel and by later academic work. The HSCA’s own photographic consultants concluded that every known photograph and film of the rifle from November 1963 depicted the same weapon.⁷

A January 2025 executive order required the release of remaining records in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection,¹⁵ and batches were released through 2025 and into 2026.¹⁶ The newly released material has focused on U.S. covert operations of the early 1960s rather than on new forensic or ballistic evidence about the rifle itself.¹⁷

1
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Appendix 10
2
Forgotten Weapons. The Italian Workhorse: Carcano M91 Rifle
3
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Chapter 4
4
Justia. King v. United States, 250 F. Supp. 410
5
House Select Committee on Assassinations. HSCA Report, Volume 6 – Backyard Photographs
6
Dartmouth College. Backyard Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald Is Authentic, Dartmouth Study Shows
7
National Archives. HSCA Report, Part 1A
8
NIST. Kennedy Assassination Bullets Preserved in Digital Form
9
RR Auction. Lee Harvey Oswald’s U.S. Marine Corps Rifle Score Book
10
Dan Rather Journalist. CBS Warren Report Investigation Transcript
11
National Archives. HSCA Report, Part 4
12
National Archives. HSCA Report, Summary of Findings
13
PBS Frontline. Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald – Conspiracy Cases For and Against
14
Britannica. Assassination of John F. Kennedy – Conspiracy Theories
15
The White House. Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy
16
National Archives. JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Release
17
Belfer Center. JFK Assassination Records: 2025 Documents Released