Hunting rhinos.

IF A small-time manufacturer from the far east side of lower nowhere called a press conference tomorrow and announced that he had perfected a new ``wonder fluid,'' derived from common seawater, that could grow hair, run your sports car, cure bad breath, and get your dog elected Queen of the May, it is not unreasonable to assume that the press would greet the announcement with a certain healthy skepticism. But let an unknown chemist from Huntsville, Alabama, venture into the domestic arms race with a new kind of handgun ammunition that allegedly penetrates soft body armor and another said to explode a human body with a single shot, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press become instant believers.

Alas, the fine print went all but unnoticed in the resulting media firestorm. Buried at the bottom of the initial reports was the detail that ``Black Rhino'' ammo would be marketed -- to law- enforcement agencies and licensed dealers only -- at about $4 a round. By comparison, a fifty-round box of 9-millimeter conventional hollowpoint ammunition can be had for between $16 and $20, or roughly 32 to 40 cents per cartridge. Considering that the cost of producing the Black Rhino differs from that of other ammo in only one component (the projectile), a few warning flags should have gone up early on. But the facts were not allowed to get in the way of a good story. AP and UPI, the three major networks, hundreds of daily newspapers, and the other dependable allies of the anti-gun movement bit like rising trout. Representative Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) raced to get before the cameras to propose legislation banning the infernal contraptions. It was Schumer by a nose. (In fairness, he is the younger man.) How sweet it was, therefore, to see the winner squirm on the Thursday, December 29, edition of Nightline when the whole thing started to come unglued. Someone in the media had done the unthinkable: inquired into the facts. In their worst nightmare, the anti-gun leadership never imagined that someone on their side would be so careless as to inject hard data into a discussion of gun control.

A little poking around by ABC produced a segment featuring testing by the prestigious H. P. White Labs of the Black Rhino ammunition that was available at the time. The claims of David Keen, the inventor of Black Rhino, were shot full of holes when a typical policeman's protective vest wasn't. The Black Rhino round performed about as well as a conventional high-speed hollowpoint, denting the test material but falling far short of penetration. Fired into ballistic gelatin, it produced cavities no more impressive than those created by hollowpoints that have been on the market for decades. And the ammunition demonstrated such erratic velocities that it could not reliably cycle the action of a semiautomatic pistol. Any home reloader who discovered, as H. P. White did, a 25 to 35 per cent variation in projectile speed would junk that batch and start over.

Flight from Reality

GUN-CONTROL advocates have been setting themselves up for a fall like this for a long time. It is crucial for them to keep hard facts out of any discussion of firearms. If they permitted a dialogue involving real knowledge of the subject, every major piece of firearms legislation, all the way back to the Gun Control Act of 1968, would be in jeopardy.

Indeed, many of the talking heads featured prominently on the evening news cannot distinguish a bullet from a breadbox and see their ignorance as a virtue. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) summed it up neatly in last year's debate over the ``assault weapon'' ban when she opined that, having seen someone die of a bullet wound, she had all the technical data she needed. This is down on all fours with seeing a golfer killed by lightning and therefore claiming an ability to predict the weather. As with so many other ideas embraced by the Left, it is far more important to feel than to think. At the risk of rubbing it in a little harder, let's review the highlights of the press's recent foray into arms control. Newsweek broke the story during the week of December 19 with a brief mention in the ``Periscope'' column. Newsweek's Peter Kottell explained on Nightline that he simply took the information from the inventor. His verification of the story consisted of a conversation with a firearms dealer he knows and a phone call to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. After learning that the new round resembled ammunition already on the market, and that none of it would perform according to the claims being made for the Rhino, he nevertheless reported the manufacturer's claims without qualification.

The story was quickly picked up by the Associated Press, and by the end of that week the ``Black Rhino'' had replaced the Toilet Monster and the Grinch That Stole Christmas in the imagination of the media. The things hadn't been tested or even seen by anyone other than the inventor, but this did not deter the redoubtable Charles Schumer. ``Today I'm announcing introduction of legislation that will ban all cop-killer bullets,'' he said at a December press conference. ``These bullets, such as the Black Rhino, have only one purpose in mind, and that is to kill policemen.''

Certainly this would be a poor way to treat the folks Mr. Keen claimed were his principal customers. The phrase ``cop-killer'' bullet has been around for more than a decade. In fact, not a single policeman has been killed by a handgun bullet through a protective vest since concealable body armor first became generally available back in the Seventies. But Representative Schumer displayed a remarkable resistance to that fact as well as to the sudden deflation of the Rhino's reputation. On the December 29 edition of Nightline, he put up a crock of the well-known article in anticipation of the long congressional winter ahead like a prairie housewife canning vegetables: Representative Schumer: So this is a real problem, and I think the issue is not whether David Keen is a charlatan -- your piece proves that quite well -- but rather, will Tanya Metaksa [a National Rifle Association spokeswoman, who had warned anyone in the media who would listen that the whole thing smelled like a hoax] and everyone else join in putting together legislation that says all cop-killer bullets, whoever invents them, are banned, and we ought to ban them before coming out on the market, unlike --

Chris Wallace: But Congressman, doesn't it look like a knee-jerk reaction? Doesn't it, in some sense, hurt your credibility when you come out in a news conference and call for banning a bullet that appears now may not exist? Representative Schumer: Well, I never called for banning this particular bullet. My very point was -- Mr. Schumer's very point was that no ban that took into account the composition of the bullet in question would satisfy him. His pet bill -- the one he tried to push through the last Congress -- would have banned any bullet that could penetrate a concealable vest, giving considerable latitude to the BATF to decide what goes on the forbidden list. Yet police body armor was never designed to be absolutely bulletproof. It comes in various levels and grades, but no concealable vest is meant to withstand rifle fire. Mr. Schumer's legislation, construed by the BATF under the supervision of the Clinton White House, could have resulted in banning most of the ammunition currently produced for hunting. That would include ammunition for granddad's 30-30 Winchester and the trophy Mauser his daddy brought back from the crusade against the Kaiser. As with the Black Rhino flap, only a few of the people who supported earlier versions of the cop-killer ammo bill actually knew what the

effects of the proposed legislation would be, and they kept that knowledge to themselves. Most of their accomplices in Congress and in the media did not know, and the last thing they wanted was for anyone to tell them. Since ABC's inexplicable act of treachery, mention of the Black Rhino has become as scarce as -- well, as scarce as real black rhinos. If he is determined to pass Rhino legislation, perhaps Mr. Schumer could turn his attention to this magnificent beast, which tends to treat Land Rovers the way Mr. Schumer treats inconvenient facts. David Keen has withdrawn his Rhino from the market (a neat trick considering that it was never actually on the market), his hopes of conning anybody out of $4 a pop pretty much shot. Newsweek lowered its Periscope. The Associated Press, having discovered that ``AP'' in military parlance means ``armor piercing,'' wonders if the whole thing wasn't some kind of weird name karma. The NRA has gone back to doing what it does best: dealing with people who know what they're talking about. And the Honorable Mr. Schumer has gone back to doing what he does best: shilling for people who hope that you and I don't.