Don't Try This at Home

[Joe Guy]

[Bicycle Bill]

I'm betting he did not win himself his well-deserved Darwin Award and the vest did stop the slug, but he will have a very livid bruise on his chest for a while from underestimating the amount of energy in the impact of what appears to be a 9-mm round, even it was stopped and the force (somewhat) spread across his chest by the vest.

-"BB"-

[Burning Petard]

Ugly little truth about all this body armor. YOU stop the bullet. The typical pistol bullet leaves the barrel with about a thousand foot/pounds of energy. That number is a generality, the actual will be more or less. Most any rifle will deliver a lot more. The body armor just spreads the force out over a larger area. That's why modern armor has steel or ceramic plates, to spread the force out more. You still get hit by the same amount of foot-pounds but over a wider area. The earlier generation that depended on the strength of the woven fiber worked, meaning the bullet usually did not penetrate the vest in a 'center of mass' hit, but the vest did deform and let some amount of the vest actually deform and 'dimple' giving a potentially serious injury (but still less than a bullet entering the body and wondering around among the organs, bones, and blood vessels. Some of the first vests were good protection from a hit with a usual 9mm pistol round, but no protection at all from a knife or icepick.

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