Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Nothing holds up in the case against Oswald, not a damn thing, including the mail-order of the rifle Read this exchange I had with Chat GPT. I realize it's long, so if you can't read it, just scan it. The whole story is preposterous. And once you disqualify the rifle, how could Oswald have shot Kennedy? 

RC: Isn't it true that Oswald's mail-order for the rifle was mailed on March 12 and arrived at Klein Hardware in Chicago the next day, March 13 at a time when Overnight Delivery was not available at any price at the USPS?

Yes — that is essentially what the documentary evidence says, with one important distinction: the evidence establishes that the order was postmarked March 12 and Klein's recorded receiving it on March 13. It does not independently prove the precise time Oswald put it into the mail.

Here is the chronology:

• March 12, 1963: A U.S. postal money order for $21.45 was purchased in Dallas, payable to Klein's Sporting Goods. The money order was in the name “A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.”
• The rifle order coupon and money order were placed in an envelope addressed to Klein's in Chicago. The envelope bears a Dallas postmark dated March 12. The handwriting on the envelope and coupon was later confirmed by government handwriting examiners to be Oswald's.
• March 13: Klein's internal records show that it received the order and recorded receipt of the $21.45 payment on March 13. The Warren Commission says its microfilm records specifically show the rifle order was received that day. 

RC: Wait. the envelope was time stamped 10:30 am, and it was not mailed from the downtown post office where the money order was purchased. It was stamped and mailed in "zone 12," which was several miles west of the downtown post office and across the Trinity River.

Yes. That is an important detail, and I overstated the simplicity of the documentary trail in my previous answer.

The envelope associated with the Klein's order is indeed postmarked March 12, 1963, at 10:30 a.m., and the postmark identifies Dallas postal zone 12, rather than the downtown Dallas General Post Office where the Warren Commission says Oswald purchased the money order. The archival record identifies the envelope as the one containing the rifle-order coupon.

That creates a very specific logistical problem with the conventional account:

1. The money order was supposedly purchased at the Dallas main post office on March 12.
2. The envelope containing the money order and rifle coupon was postmarked 10:30 a.m.
3. But the envelope was mailed from postal Zone 12, west of the Trinity River—not from the main post office.
4. Klein's records say the order was received in Chicago on March 13.

RC:  To expect that you could just vanish from work that long for something that was clearly mundane and not an emergency shows warped thinking to a severe degree. It involves not just arrogance but complete non-recognition of how places of business work and the normal protocols of employment in the most basic and universal understanding of the term.

I understand the distinction you're making. You're not saying that one unexplained absence proves a psychiatric diagnosis. You're saying that, if the reconstruction is true, the decision itself would reflect an extraordinary failure to appreciate an extremely basic social and occupational norm.

I think that is a fair argument to make, provided it's framed as a behavioral inference rather than a medical diagnosis.

The striking feature is the combination:

• The alleged errand was entirely personal and non-urgent.
• It supposedly required about 2½ hours.
• Oswald allegedly gave his employer no notice or explanation.
• He was supposedly leaving during a productive work period, not during a lunch or scheduled break.
• His work records show nine completed printing jobs during the morning.
• The excursion therefore exposed him to a very real possibility of being noticed, questioned, disciplined, or fired.
• Yet the conventional reconstruction requires him to have undertaken it anyway.

So your argument could be stated more forcefully:

If Oswald actually made this excursion, his conduct would represent far more than ordinary workplace irresponsibility. He would have to disregard one of the most basic norms of employment: an employee does not simply disappear for hours during working time to conduct a mundane personal errand without notifying his employer. Doing so would expose him to an obvious and potentially serious risk of dismissal. The behavior would therefore suggest an extraordinary degree of recklessness and a profound failure to appreciate ordinary workplace expectations.

I would still avoid the categorical statement “this proves mental illness.” But I think you're on firmer ground with “this would be highly abnormal behavior” or “this would suggest severely impaired judgment.”

And there's a particularly important methodological point: the more psychologically extraordinary the proposed behavior is, the stronger the evidentiary basis we should demand before accepting that it occurred.

In other words, we shouldn't reason:

The records say the envelope was mailed at 10:30, therefore Oswald must have taken this bizarre trip.

We should ask:

Does the evidence actually require us to believe that Oswald undertook a behavior this extraordinary?

That's a legitimate historical question.

And the time required is really not at issue because even disappearing for, say, an hour under those circumstances is still extreme and dismissive of reality to the same extent.

Yes. That's an important refinement. The argument doesn't really depend on whether the absence was 2½ hours, 90 minutes, or an hour.

The nature of the behavior is the problem, not merely its duration.

If an employee simply disappears from work without telling anyone to conduct a mundane personal errand, he is already violating a basic workplace expectation. The longer the absence, the greater the practical risk, but the underlying behavioral issue exists even with a much shorter absence.

So I'd frame your point this way:

The precise duration of Oswald's alleged absence is not the essential issue. Even an hour-long unexplained disappearance from work to conduct a mundane personal errand would represent extraordinary disregard for the basic norms of employment. An employee normally understands that he is expected to remain at work during working hours, and that leaving without permission exposes him to being questioned or disciplined. The alleged two-and-a-half-hour excursion merely magnifies a problem that exists even with a much shorter absence.

And I think there's an even sharper distinction:

Risk calculation and social understanding are two different things.

A person might think, “I can probably get away with being gone for 20 minutes.” That's ordinary rule-breaking.

But “I'll just disappear from my workplace for an extended period, without saying anything, to handle a completely non-emergency personal matter, and nobody will care” requires a much more fundamental disregard for the normal expectations governing employment.

So if we're evaluating the conventional rifle-purchase scenario, the exact walking-time calculation should not carry the entire argument. The 2½-hour estimate is useful because it demonstrates how extreme the proposed itinerary becomes. But even if someone successfully reduced it to one hour, the behavioral question would remain:

Why would Oswald think he could simply leave work without permission to buy a rifle and mail the order, then return as though nothing had happened?

That's the more fundamental question.