March 20, 2004
UMBRELLA MAN STRIKES AGAIN
Tainan suffers a Dallas moment:
Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were shot today while campaigning on the last day before the presidential election, but their injuries were not life-threatening, a senior official said.
Chiou I-jen, secretary-general in the Presidential Office, said the president was shot in the stomach and the vice president was hit in the right knee while their motorcade was cruising the streets in the southern city of Tainan.
The pair were in a convertible. No news yet on the proximity of knolls or book depositories, but we do have a magic bullet:
Vice-President Annette Lu was wounded in the knee and it is believed the bullet then struck the President.
I bet someone named Lee was involved.
Posted by Tim Blair at March 20, 2004 01:05 AMThe magic bullets in Tiawan are ceramic.
My nephew had one fired at him two years ago.
He said it was an interesting experience.
Actually, this is very possible. A full-sized handgun (9mm or larger) firing full-metal-jacket rounds can indeed penetrate one person and still have enough energy to wound another (assuming that the bullet didn't hit bone squarely; though there have ben cases of bullets glancing off of a bone they didn't hit squarely and going back out through the skin). This is one of the big reasons police officers in America went to hollowpoint bullets: they not only increase effectiveness, they reduce penetration. The "magic bullet" theory in the Kennedy shooting is that the bullet could not only change direction several times, but it could also do a whole host of other improbable things.
//gun nut lecture mode OFF//
Dave P,
I don't think you're suggesting it did, but to be clear, the bullet from the Kennedy assassination did nothing unusual. The "magic bullet theory" is a complete distortion of PROVABLE facts. The path of the bullet was a straight line from the sniper's nest through Kennedy and the Gov. Computer modeling recreating their exact positioning in the vehicle proves this.
Posted by: RC at March 20, 2004 at 09:06 AMI just want to state here that I will close this post's comments if it looks like turning into a full-blown Who-Killed-Kennedy free-for-all. The man has been dead nearly as long as I have been alive, I am not lending my bandwidth out to grassy-knoll obsessives. (The discussion is now free to turn to what an officious bitch I am. I don't care, it's a small price to pay to keep this corner of the internet JFK-free!)
Posted by: Andrea Harris at March 20, 2004 at 11:21 AMOK Andrea, but can we talk about Jack Ruby's alien whorehouse at Roswell?
Posted by: slatts at March 20, 2004 at 11:59 AM