Bulletproof or Bullet Resistant?

What’s the difference between bulletproof armor and bullet-resistant armor? Are they one in the same?

The short answer — no. Long answer — not even close.

The top Google search hits define bulletproof as ‘impenetrable to bullets; impervious to assault, damage or failure; guaranteed.”

There are a few words in there that are simply inaccurate, like ‘guaranteed’ and ‘impenetrable.’ If you remember one thing from this post, let this be it: In ballistics, NOTHING is guaranteed.

According to the National Institute of Justice, the harsh reality is that “there is no such thing as bullet- or stab-proof armor.” As much as we would love to guarantee the life of every hero wearing body armor, we simply cannot. Why? Because we understand ballistics at a higher level.

Here are a few reasons why any armor claiming to be ‘bulletproof’ should be seriously under question:

• The variety of weapons and ballistic threat levels evolve drastically over time, and no technology is guaranteed impervious to tomorrow’s threats
• There are hundreds of calibers of bullets, traveling at various speeds — any of which can be stacked upon armor in any number of ways — to guarantee anything with this much variability is naïve
• There is no legal defense in existence that will support the claim of ‘bulletproof armor’

Simply put, bulletproof armor does not exist.

The good news is, bullet-resistant armor does exist. And, to quote the National Institute of Justice again, “ballistic-resistant body armor can protect against a significant number of types of handgun and rifle ammunition, and stab-resistant body armor can help protect against knives and other sharp weapons.”

We take this explanation seriously, because ‘resistant’ implies that there is a limit. At Angel Armor, we do extensive and rigorous testing on all of our products. We use a proprietary regression curve analysis to have an in-depth understanding of how our armor will perform when exposed to various bullets at a range of velocities. Characterizing and understanding our technology provides customers a higher confidence that our technology will perform to expectation.

A healthy awareness of how ballistic armor performs can be the difference between life and death. And at the end of the day, we want you to come home. Angel Armor will do anything in our power to help make this possible.

Until next time,

Angel Armor