#Jfk

In March of 1963, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald purchased an M38 Carcano rifle and some quantity of ammunition from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Oswald would later use this rifle and ammunition (or so the official narrative goes) to assassinate the then- President of the United States John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

These days, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time at the dawn of the smokeless powder era there was a huge variety of bolt-action repeating rifles being developed to re-arm the military powers of the world. While the Mauser 98 and its progeny eventually took the world by storm, in the early days of repeating bolt actions rifles like the Krag–Jørgensen, Mannlicher, and Belgian Mauser competed on the world stage for contracts.

For the collector of firearms owned by famous people in history, Rock Island’s next auction holds a weapon that could be the centerpiece of any collection: An M1 rifle, the “deadliest rifle in the world”, owned by John F. Kennedy:

The caliber wars have raged for as long as there have been calibers. At the end of last year, we looked at an article from 1891 deriding as useless small caliber rounds – that is, .30 caliber rounds – versus their larger .45 caliber counterparts. But how do these compare, really? One extra data point has been added by the Royal Armouries at Leeds, who tested a Martini-Henry rifle against ballistic gelatin: