Shooting Blanks   

Are armor-piercing bullets guaranteed to cause baseball-size wounds and kill on contact enough to spice up a slow news week? Apparently. But in the case of Rhino-Ammo the story was too bad to be true.

The week after Christmas major news outlets reported that an Alabama company had developed a fragmenting bullet, called "Rhino-Ammo," capable of causing catastrophic injury, and another "Black Rhino" bullet that could penetrate a bullet-proof vest.

The bullets' media-friendly inventor hyped Rhino-Ammo to anyone who would listen, claiming it could bypass federal regulations banning "cop-killer bullets" because it was made of carbon-based plastic polymers instead of metal.

"The beauty behind it is that it makes an incredible wound," manufacturer David Keen of the Huntsville-based Signature Products Corporation told the Associated Press. "There's no way to stop the bleeding. I don't care where it hits. They're down for good."

The media picked up the story with zeal, sparking the swift introduction of legislation in Congress to ban Rhino-Ammo. USA Today ominously reported, "New bullets made to blast through body armor and blow baseball-size holes in a human body are expected to hit gun stores Monday."

Well, not quite.

It turned out the bullets "didn't perform as people were led to believe," says U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spokesman Tom Hill. "The press, in essence, built them up."

ATF velocity tests on Rhino-Ammo bullets showed they were no different than any other hollow-point bullets already on the market, according to Hill. The ATF also says it still has no proof that the armor-piercing Black Rhinos exist.

So why were the media duped into reporting the sensationalized claims of an unknown Alabama research chemist with limited experience in the ammunition business?

Newsweek's Peter Katel says the story began with a phone call from Keen last December. Newsweek ran a 115-word item in its Periscope section saying the ammunition was "about to hit America's streets," and largely quoting Keen's promotional material.

That led to a longer AP story that ran in the New York Times and other papers across the country. Keen offered AP sample rounds for independent testing, but the wire service declined because of time constraints.

"In retrospect we wish we had done the tests," says AP's Bob Dvorchak. "I don't think Keen had a sense of what his words would mean in cold print."

Within days of the first stories Keen was interviewed on each of the networks, and CNN was claiming his bullets would cause nearly instantaneous death.

"I don't have any regrets," says Newsweek's Katel, who took the original Rhino-Ammo Keen had given him to a gun dealer for evaluation, but made no attempt to have the bullets independently tested. "I called the ATF. I talked with Keen repeatedly. We had the bullets... We had done our part."

Katel says he doesn't feel that Newsweek was duped. "Sure the guy hyped it, but there is a real issue here," he says. "The bullet works. It doesn't work to the extent [Keen] claimed, but it works."

By the end of December Newsweek turned over some of the Rhino-Ammo to ABC's "Nightline," which wanted to do its own tests.

"It seemed to us that there were gaping holes in [Keen's] claims," says "Nightline" correspondent Dave Marash, who took four bullets to a Maryland ballistics lab. "Nightline" reported that when the Rhino-Ammo was fired into a block of gelatin simulating human flesh, the wound was an unremarkable three-and-a-half inches deep and less than two inches across, far from the nine-inch-deep gaping wounds Keen was touting.

Marash says he was "flat amazed" that "Nightline" was the first news organization to test the bullets and was equally surprised that Newsweek handed its bullets over to ABC to be tested, essentially giving away the story.

The National Rifle Association praised Marash and "Nightline" for penetrating the hype and revealing what the NRA believed to be a hoax from the beginning. "I think the media covered it terribly. Clearly, there was very little fact-checking done," says NRA spokesman Chip Walker. "It was absolutely mob journalism. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this guy didn't have a manufacturing license and that no one had ever seen the bullets – simple questions, simple answers."

Keen, who says he was "impressed" with the coverage he received (except on "Nightline"), blames the Rhino-Ammo's lackluster performance on the use of non-perfected, preproduction rounds in testing. Keen is now shying away from the media amid anonymous death threats and claims by the NRA that he may really be a gun control advocate trying to create media hysteria to further his cause.

Despite all the controversy, Rhino-Ammo could be available at a store near you by early spring.