Assassinations: The Guns of Dallas

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The pistol that shot Abraham Lincoln is preserved in Ford's Theater, now a Washington museum. The gun that killed Garfield is sous cloche in the Justice Department. The weapon that took McKinley's life is kept by a historical society in Buffalo, where he was shot. Last week the nation was assured that the 6.5-mm. Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with which Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy would not end up in a private collection or a public peep show.

John J. King, a Denver oilman and gun fancier, paid Oswald's widow Marina $10,000 for the rifle a year ago, promised an additional $35,000 on delivery, then sued to recover the weapon from federal authorities. In a Dallas courtroom, less than a mile from the stretch of road where the President was killed, U.S. Judge Joe E. Estes last week awarded the Federal Government permanent custody of the assassination rifle and the .38-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver with which Oswald killed Policeman J. D. Tippit. Both weapons, said the U.S. Justice Department, will thus be preserved as relics of "evidentiary and historical significance."