It is reported that Richard Brown, District Attorney for the Borough of Queens, New York City, has stated on the public record that 425 of the 616 police officers killed in the line of duty in the United States between 1994 and 2003 were killed with an FN Five seveN pistol, which he breathlessly informs us all is a deadly, armor-piercing, cop-killing pistol¹ that can defeat body armor.
This is an impressive feat for a pistol that only entered manufacture in 2000. DA Brown's assertion that its armor-piercing capabilities have wreaked two thirds² of the death and mayhem among police officers during that ten-year period is even more remarkable in view of the facts that (1) the armor-piercing round fired by the Five seveN (and by its companion weapon the P90) is not imported into the US, and would be illegal for civilian purchase if it was; and (2) since the NRA helped draft a law back in the 1960s restricting armor-piercing handgun ammunition to law-enforcement use only, no police officer has ever been killed by an armor-piercing handgun round that penetrated his bulletproof vest.
Fortunately, we have a source of actual numbers to look at, right here at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Looking at this table of LEO deaths in the line of duty broken down by year and cause, we see that to start with, DA Brown's raw numbers are completely wrong. He says 616 LEOs died in the line of duty from 1994 to 2003. However, we can see from this table that between 1996 and 2003, 1319 officers died in the line of duty. We can conclude that 703 officers rose from the dead in 1994 and 1995 (years for which this table does not include numbers); we can conclude that Brown meant to say "in New York City" and the City of New York, even with its strict gun laws, is nevertheless so violent that NYC accounts for half of all the law enforcement fatalities in the United States; or we can conclude that DA Brown didn't bother to check his facts before he opened his mouth. You make the call.
Let's add in the datum that the Five seveN only entered manufacture in 2000. Oops. (In fact, it only appeared on the civilian market in 2004, sans its armor-piercing ammunition. Oops again. We'll give DA Brown the benefit of the doubt for now and ignore that minor technicality.) So, it's only even POSSIBLE for the Five seveN to be involved in the LEO deaths since 2000. Referring back to our handy table, we find that between 2000 and 2003, 234 officers in the US died in the line of duty from gunshot wounds.
Of those 234 officers, Brown asserts 425 were killed with the Five seveN. That's, let me see here ... 425 out of 234 ... carry the one ... that's 181.6% of them. Oops number three.
In short, DA Brown is shamelessly lying through his teeth to play for the media, pulling completely fabricated numbers out of the air for the microphone. Someone in a position to do so should publicly call him on it.
One final point: It is worth noting that during the period covered by this table, seventy-two law enforcement officers died in the US as a result of terrorist actions. All 72 died in 2001. Further comment should not be necessary.
