John McAdams is a university professor who believes strongly that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot President Kennedy. McAdams doesn't believe a conspiracy of any kind was involved. McAdams believes the Warren Commission (WC) was correct in all its essential conclusions.

In McAdams' opinion, anyone who defends the conspiracy position is a "conspiracy buff." McAdams frequently refers to those who reject the lone-gunman theory as "buffs." McAdams even applies this label to experts who speak about aspects of the assassination that involve their field of expertise. For example, when McAdams learned that a professor of neuroscience at a Canadian university rejected the lone-gunman view that Kennedy's backward head snap was the result of a neuromuscular reaction, he opined that the professor was either a "buff" or had been spoon fed erroneous information by a critic of the lone-gunman theory.

McAdams' attitude toward virtually anyone who disagrees with him about the assassination is somewhat surprising, given the fact that for the last three decades surveys have consistently shown that anywhere from 65-90 percent of the American people believe Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy (with about 5 percent undecided).

McAdams acknowledges that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy, but he suggests this is because most people have been misled by disinformation put out by conspiracy theorists.

There is ample evidence that it is highly unlikely that any one man, especially Lee Harvey Oswald, fired all the shots in the assassination. The results of the rifle tests conducted by the Warren Commission (WC), by CBS, and by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) make it indisputably clear that the alleged shooting feat would have been extremely difficult even for an accomplished marksman. Not one of the riflemen in those tests was able to go 2 for 3 against a target area the size of Kennedy's upper back and head on the first attempt.

The WC's rifle test is especially revealing. Three Master-rated riflemen took part. They fired at stationary - yes, stationary - target boards from a 30-foot tower. They missed the head and neck area of the target boards 17 out of 18 times, even though two of them took more than 6 seconds to fire, and even though one of those two shooters took 8.25 seconds to fire. Additionally, many of their misses were far apart on the target board. In the CBS rifle test, which was somewhat more realistic than the WC's test, not one of the eleven expert riflemen was able to go 2 for 3 on his first attempt, and seven of them were unable to do so on ANY attempt.

WC staffer Wesley Liebeler warned the Commission in an internal memorandum that critical people would never take the Commission's claims about Oswald's marksmanship seriously. Oswald was at best a mediocre marksman. The very best he did in the Marines was to barely qualify in the middle of three rifle qualification categories, even though he was firing at stationary targets with a semiautomatic rifle. Col. A. G. Folsom noted during his WC testimony that Oswald's score book indicated Oswald was lucky just to have barely qualified in the middle qualification category. Dozens of Oswald's former Marine colleagues later said Oswald was a rather poor shot. Russians who saw Oswald shoot in the Soviet Union said the same thing.

The lone-gunman shooting scenario now requires that the supposed single assassin completely missed, not just Kennedy, but the entire huge presidential limousine with his first and closest shot. This is the only way to expand the alleged lone gunman's firing tie to over 8 seconds, since there is now wide agreement that a shot was fired before the limousine passed beneath the oak tree. I can't imagine how even a mediocre rifleman could have missed the entire limousine from less than 140 feet away and from 60 feet up. Even the WC labeled the first-shot-miss scenario an "improbability." The limousine would have presented a target that was over 120 square feet in size. Can anyone fathom completely missing a target that size from less than 140 feet away, especially on the first and closest shot?