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When he was a Marine, Oswald had qualified as a marksman and, though that is the corps' lowest of three rifleman's ratings, it makes him a good shot by civilian standards. Oswald's mother Marguerite sold two pages from his Marine rifle-score book; they show him making 48 and 49 points out of a possible 50 in rapid fire at 200 yards from a sitting position, without a scope.
Some Army experts checking out Oswald's rifle were able to hit simulated human targets at the assumed motorcade distance in the same time that was available to Oswald. After considerable practice to manage the rifle's stiff bolt action, even Lattimer's son Gary, only 14 at the time, was able to place three shots within a head target at 263 ft. within twelve seconds. Marina Oswald testified that she had heard Oswald practicing the rifle's bolt action outside their Dallas home in 1963. From the Book Depository building, Oswald also had the benefit of resting his gun on a book carton and steadying his grip with an arm sling.
It is true, as the critics stress and the Warren Commission concedes, that Oswald's scope was mounted slightly off center; the rifle is so constructed as to make a precise center mounting impossible. Practice shooting is required to compensate for the scope's misalignment. Oswald at least once told Marina he was going off to target-shoot. Also, as one army weapons expert advised the commission, Oswald may have been disastrously lucky in that the 3° decline on which the Kennedy car was traveling could have offset the scope's error.
The other evidence against Oswald is overwheLming. His handwriting on mail orders for the rifle, as well as for the revolver used to kill Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit, is proof that he bought both under an alias (A. Hidell). On the eve of the assassination, he caught a ride with a coworker, Buell Wesley Frazier, to make a rare weeknight visit to his estranged wife in a Dallas suburb; he claimed that he wanted to pick up some curtain rods. Although his rented room in Dallas had all its needed rods, next day he carried a long, thin package in brown paper to work with Frazier. On this day—the day of the assassination —Oswald spurted some 50 feet ahead of his friend instead of walking, as he usually did, with him from the parking lot to the building.
The wrapping paper and the rifle later were found on the sixth floor of the building from which the shots
were fired. A palm print of Oswald's was on the rifle barrel, under its stock. The intact bullet recovered at the hospital and a fragment of the second bullet, found in the car, matched the rifling of the gun. Oswald's flight from his perch, which was handily obscured by boxes moved by a crew laying new flooring, was not as impossibly speedy as the critics contend. He was seen on the second floor by the building manager and a police officer about 90 seconds after the shooting. Warren Commission investigators retraced the same route from the sixth floor and reached the second floor, without running, in the allotted time. Oswald did not have to struggle through the cartons, meticulously wipe prints off the gun and carefully hide it; he apparently simply pushed a box or two aside, dropped the gun, and walked down four flights of stairs.