It never ceases to amaze me that reporters aren’t ripped to shreds by their editors for outlandish claims like this.

Struggling New York Knicks point guard Raymond Felton allegedly pointed a huge, armor-piercing pistol at his estranged wife during a domestic dispute, sources said, and was arrested Tuesday morning for gun possession.

Ariane Raymondo-Felton – who recently filed for divorce – brought the Belgian-made pistol, an FNH Five-Seven 28mm handgun to the 20th Precinct on the Upper West Side, and the starting point guard later turned himself in for questioning, sources said.

A 28mm? Say, that’s impressive!

Tell me more:

Sources said the 28 mm handgun is one of the largest made, and that his wife took it from their home on West 63rd Street.

I’m going to gently suggest that the “sources” used by Larry Celona, Natasha Velez and Jamie Schram are drooling idiots… and the reporters aren’t much better.

If any one of the three journalists had bothered to follow their own link, they’d wind up at the FN-USA web site, where they would discover that the FN Five-SeveN pistol fires a 40-grain 5.7mm diameter bullet, roughly the same size as .22LR bullet used to train five-year-olds how to shoot.

It’s loaded with more powder to attain higher velocities, and has a different design. It’s closest ballistic counterpart is the .22 Hornet, which is used for vermin and small game.

28mm is not the diameter of the bullet, but the length of the case. Far from being “one of the largest made,” the 5.7x28mm is a scrawny thing, just a little longer that the common 9mm and .45 ACP pistol cartridges, and not even as effective in most types of targets.

A real 28mm diameter bullet would be more than twice as large as the largest handgun cartridge ever made, and the recoil energy would break the arm of anyone who dared to fire it. Currently, the most powerful production handgun cartridge in the world is the .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, with a paltry .50″ (12.7mm) diameter bullet.

The only thing that might come close to the gun imagined in the NY Post story is the “Samaritan” carried in Hellboy… but the last I checked, that’s still fiction.

Layers of editors and fact-checkers, indeed.