As strange as that may sound, there is a very good chance that you, or one of your fellow officers, will go on duty tonight wearing body armor that may provide far less ballistic protection than expected.
Modern body armor is designed to protect the wearer from deadly high-velocity handgun rounds using a sophisticated combination of bullet-stopping materials, strategies and tactics.
From the moment a bullet tears through an officer’s uniform shirt at supersonic speed, it engages several different layers of an amazing “ballistic sandwich” engineered to take on many different roles during an extremely violent ballistic event that takes place–from beginning to end–within 3 nanoseconds. All in a distance of less than two inches. A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second (1/1,000,000,000), so all of this interaction with the bullet and the vest is happening very very quickly.
In fact, Safariland’s body armor engineers use ultra-high speed digital photography to slow this incredibly destructive event down to the point where they can study, frame-by-frame, how each layer of material and individual vest component interacts with the bullet during each phase of the ballistic event. Unimaginable forces are created by these devastating impacts, and they are being transmitted through, and absorbed by, your vest’s ballistic panel and your upper torso.