Safety
The FN 303 was involved in a controversial 2004 incident in Boston in which Victoria Snelgrove was shot in the eye and fatally wounded. Subsequent tests by Boston Police indicated that the 303's accuracy "decreased significantly" after about three hundred firings. This is circumstantially corroborated by testimony of the officer who fired the weapon, stating that he was aiming at a rioter throwing bottles and did not even know that a bystander had been hit.
A fifteen million dollar wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Boston and FN Herstal was settled in July 2006. In 2007 the Boston Police destroyed their remaining FN303s, stating they were more powerful and lethal than had been anticipated.
During violent protests in front of the ARCELOR building in Luxembourg city on May 11, 2009, the weapon was used for the first time by Luxembourg police forces. An RTL cameraman was hit in the hand, breaking one finger.
Read more about this topic: FN 303
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”
—Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)
“Can we not teach children, even as we protect them from victimization, that for them to become victimizers constitutes the greatest peril of all, specifically the sacrifice—physical or psychological—of the well-being of other people? And that destroying the life or safety of other people, through teasing, bullying, hitting or otherwise, “putting them down,” is as destructive to themselves as to their victims.”
—Lewis P. Lipsitt (20th century)
“For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)