By Bonar Menninger
This story offers additional information about the theory that President John F. Kennedy was inadvertently shot by one of his own Secret Service agents, as chronicled in the 1992 book, Mortal Error, and reported in the October 2017 Medium story, Hidden in Plain Sight.
From the moment Baltimore gunsmith Howard Donahue reluctantly concluded in 1977 that ballistic evidence proved President Kennedy was mistakenly shot by Secret Service agent George Hickey on November 22, 1963, he assumed the agent had involuntarily squeezed the trigger of his AR15 as he lost his balance in the back of the open follow-up car amid the bedlam of Lee Harvey Oswald’s attack.
Donahue’s theory upended conventional wisdom about the assassination, etched the president’s death in the darkest of irony and raised questions about what might have been. Had the presidential limousine not braked suddenly after Oswald opened fire, the chain reaction that led to Hickey’s shot might not have occurred.
But a little-known defect in the earliest model AR15 now raises the possibility that Hickey may not have been directly responsible for the accident after all. Rather, his firearm may have discharged on its own, without the agent ever touching the trigger. The design flaw — recently brought to light by a retired Southern…
