Boston Herald Bullet Points

Here's another Boston Herald article on the 2002 shooting of Officer Zenaida Flores (thoroughly covered in this previous post).

Officer Zenaida Flores, pumped with so-called "cop-killer" bullets on a grimy Chinatown street, may have escaped bleeding to death by less than half an inch, one of the city's top docs testified yesterday.

Dr. Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the mushrooming hollow-point bullets that bore through the 31-year-old patrolwoman's left arm and thigh missed major arteries in both limbs by only "one to two centimeters."

Now click HERE for a decent write-up on the "cop killer" bullet myth.

In the mid 1960's, Dr. Paul Kopsch (an Ohio coroner), Daniel Turcos (a police sergeant) and Donald Ward (Dr. Kopsch's special investigator) began experimenting with special purpose handgun ammunition. Their objective was to develop a law enforcement round capable of improved penetration against hard targets like windshield glass and automobile doors. Conventional bullets, made primarily from lead, are often ineffective against hard targets especially when fired at handgun velocities. In the 1970's, Kopsch, Turcos and Ward produced their "KTW" handgun ammunition using steel cored bullets capable of great penetration.

[snip]

Despite the facts that "KTW" ammunition had never been available to the general public and that no police officer has ever been killed by a handgun bullet penetrating their body armor, the media incorrectly reported that the Teflon coated bullets were designed to defeat the body armor that law enforcement officers were beginning to use. The myth of "Cop-killer" bullets was born.

Hollow-point handgun ammunition is designed to expand on impact and is specifically designed to prevent over-penetration of the target. This in turn decreases the risk of injury to innocent bystanders who might be located beyond the intended target. It is not designed to, nor is it capable of penetrating a police officer's bulletproof [read: bullet-resistant] vest. You would think the gun control "safety" advocates would favor its use.

As far as lethality is concerned, any firearm, regardless of caliber or type ammunition used, will deliver a fatal wound should a major artery be severed as a result thereof.

Misleading reporting like this only provides the gun control lobby with more ammunition (pun intended) to further advance their agenda of fear, lies, and misinformation on an uninformed public. But hey, it makes for a more dramatic story this way - gotta sell those newspapers.