CD87 p92 - SS tells us the rifle Kleins shipped to Hidell was a 91(T)roop (S)pecial carbine

[Bob Prudhomme]

Here is another possibility. Look at this photo for a second.



Unless the photo has been altered, the sling clearly seems to be attached to the side sling mount on the butt of this rifle, while the other end of the sling could very well be attached to a bottom mount sling ring on the forestock. The sling also appears to be a rope. Can you imagine how uncomfortable it was to carry this weapon slung over your shoulder, with the combination of the thin rope sling and the two differently placed sling mounts?

If the BYP and the NARA rifles were the same, what likely happened is that, at the same time the rope was replaced with the wider sling seen on the NARA rifle, the bottom sling ring was replaced with a side sling ring. This by no means implies that this person was Oswald; it just portrays another possibility.

As I said before, records show that a small percentage of short rifles had bottom mount sling rings, though how they came to be that way is not so clear. It must be remembered that these rifles were imported as war surplus, and that the company preparing them for export was often not dealing with complete rifles, and had to rob parts off the worst rifles to make complete rifles of the better weapons. It would not be unheard of to rob a bottom sling mount from an M91 to replace a missing side sling mount on an M91/38.