Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

A few years ago (and it must have been quite a few years ago because I can’t find it in my almost ten years of blog posts) the LMI and I were in a surplus store and found a size extra-small flak jacket. You know, one of those Vietnam/Nation Guard vests that look like an olive life preserver. (Technically, I guess thats exactly what it is, come to think of it.) Anyway, being an oddball size it was an easy thing to figure let’s spend $15 on it, take it to the range, and see what happens.

If youre the TL;DR type, here it is succinctly: all pistol except super-fast bullets were stopped. No .45 ACP, no 9mm, no .40 S&W, no .38 Special penetrated the vest. The handgun bullets that did penetrate were lightweight (180 gr.) .44 bullets driven at ‘dont try this at home’ velocities and uber-light (95 gr.) JHP’s out of a .357 with similar speeds. Both those bullets were approaching low-end rifle velocities so no surprise there since penetration in conventional firearms is almost always more about velocity than bullet construction. You push a gumball fast enough, it’ll penetrate.

Once we’d exhausted the gamut of pistol calibers and various loadings it was time to move onto the rifles. No surprises there. Shredded kevlar was everywhere. Nothing was stopped.

None of this is going to be a surprise to anyone with a logical mind. Flak jackets were designed to stop irregular shaped pieces of metal at moderate velocities. A .451″ piece of lead traveling at 950 fps is pretty close to that demographic. Higher velocity stuff will just whip through it.

So, in a nutshell, yes they’ll stop most non-magnum pistol rounds and .22. They will not stop anything from a rifle (unless its a rifle that shoots pistol cartridges). Better than nothing, and cheap enough (usually) that almost everyone can at least afford one, but there are better choices if you can swing it.

ETA: It would be criminally negligent of me to forget to mention that if you want real-world info on what will and will not stop a bullet, not armchair theory, then you need to head over to The Box O’ Truth. Shooting bullet proof glass, kevlar vests, sheetrock, car doors….these guys do it all and the information is priceless.

And here’s where they shot a flak jacket and chronicled the results.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Dammit. Lost one of my gloves today. The irony is that this glove was not one of the 40 or so pairs of surplus wool gloves I picked up last year, but rather one half of a unique set. I can console myself, I guess, by knowing I’ve got several dozen pairs of other gloves but still…annoying. Nice to not be too inconvenienced by it though. Swore at myself for being careless, and then pulled a pair outta storage.

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I get so wrapped up, from time to time, in the guns-n-mags aspect of proposed legislation that I sometimes overlook some of the ancillary stuff. There was a link on Drudge to an article about a fella who, apparently, shot up a home, set it ablaze, and then offed himself. When he was found, it was noted, and played up a bit, that he was wearing body armour.

From time to time, legislation is proposed (or passed) to limit the availability of body armour to ‘civilians’. (Quick semantic argument: cops are civilians, too.) In some localities, these types of rules are already in place. Most folks would say if you arent a cop or security guard, why would you need body armour? Isn’t that just a wee bit over-the-top?

Some folks in ‘high risk’ businesses wear body armour. I know there are jewelry shops and diamond vendors in NYC who wear the stuff. There’s probably more than one pharmacist somewhere who wears it under their smock. And there are probably plenty more industries and businesses, some in ‘high crime’ areas, that have folks wearing it.

I’ve had several sets of body armour over the years. I could probably count the times I’ve worn it on one hand. Almost always those times were at the range when teaching newbies to shoot. I think the only time I ever actually wore it ‘for reals’ was one time when I was accompanying someone on a ‘large(!!) amount of cash’ transaction. (Also the only time I ever carried two pistols. I figured if I needed the armour I’d need the guns, and vice versa.)

Given that very, very low usage rate, is there a place for body armour in preparing for the uncertain future? Arguable, I think. Certainly I’d rather have it and not need it blah, blah…. But on the other hand, it’s fairly expensive for something that you’ll probably never use and those resources can be best used elsewhere. It’s a choice between dumping several hudrred dollars on something you may never use versus dumping it on something you may be more likely to use (like food.)

I suppose the degree of practicality depends on the particular flavor of apocalypse that you see coming. If youre convinced that the end of the world looks a lot like ‘The Stand’ you probably don’t have as urgent a need as if the end of the world looked like ‘Jericho’. While pretty much every permutation of the apocalypse will have gunfire in it’s soundtrack at some point, you never know if it’ll be the refrain or just a few opening notes. Take the LA Riots for example:

Korean store employees/owners ca. 1992. +20 for friend-or-foe identifying headbands, -100 for ballistic resistance.

No one really planned on an impromptu re-enactment of Rio Bravo that day, and I’m sure that a nice set of plates in a good carrier would have been quite welcome. (Although there are pictures from the riots that do show some merchants wearing body armour.) The point being that although this was hardly an end-of-the-world event it was certainly an event that would have called for some serious ballistic protection.

As the economy declines, people start queuing up for food, and robberies become more common it would be nice to have some concealable body armour to wear on those trips to the barely-stocked supermarket or no-more-than-three-people-in-the-store-at-once convenience stores. When the gloves come off and it’s Katrina-ville where subtlety is uncalled for, then it’s time for the less discrete armour systems.

Personally, I doubt there’s much in my future that requires a high level of personal ballistic resistance. My goal in life is to leave ugly armed encounters to others and keep openings in my body limited to the ones I came with from the factory. But, you never know what’s gonna happen. So….there’s armour in storage.

My point, though, is that eventually this is another product that is going to get nudged out of the ‘readily available’ market and tucked away into the ‘Mil/LE only’ market. If not by legislative shenanigans then by economic ones as the manufacturers and distributors are ‘encouraged’ to restrict the availability to ‘legitimate end users’.

If you don’t think youre going to need either concealable armour or plates in a carrier then don’t worry about it. But if you think it’s something youre going to want down the line, you may want to consider acquiring some before it stops being overlooked by the ‘ban it for the children’ crowd.