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My Letter...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

After reading your recent article I just had to comment on the extremely poor job of fact checking you did before you published such completely false and misleading information about the FN 5.7. In your article you state as fact:

"The gun, called a "cop killer" by many for its ability to pierce 48 layers of bullet-proof Kevlar, is the first of its type to be recovered by authorities in New York City.
"The FN 5.7 is a lethal handgun imported from Belgium and capable of easily penetrating most police vets and plates," Brown said. "While this is the first time that such a deadly weapon has been recovered in New York City, its presence is troubling and makes the job of street cops that much more dangerous."
Since 1994, 425 of the 616 police officers killed in the line of duty have been killed with a FN 5.7, the DA said."

First thing that needs to be pointed out is that the FN 5.7 has only been available in the US civilian market since early 2004.

Next, according to FBI Statistics, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/leoka03.pdf, these are the facts as compiled by the US Government on the Law Enforcement Officer murders during the period of 1994-2003:

Table 29
Officers Killed...............616

Killed with Firearms.....568

Killed with Handguns...425

Table 30

Table 30 lists the caliber of weapons used in the murder of Law enforcement officers during the period. Notice that there is not even one instance of 5.7MM listed during that period.

Table 34

Table 34 tells us that only 19 Officers were killed by bullets penetrating their vests during that period.

Table 35

Table 35 then tells us that none of those bullets, that penetrated those 19 vests and killed their wearer, came from handguns. They in fact came from rifles.

Now Mr. Stirling, I certainly hope that this obvious factual oversight is not a result of your journalistic integrity being displaced by any personal bias on this issue. I think we can all agree that any murder of a police officer, or any person for that matter, is a horrible event. I also think we can all agree that your readers deserve to have information that is accurate and free of distortion. I certainly hope that you will use more dilligence, than you obviously did on this story, to insure that that future stories contain information that is a little more objective and correct.

Thanks for your time,

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