[Jeff Higgins]

There seems to be some miss-information on this thread concerning "armor piercing". That's entirely understandable considering the various meanings applied to this class of ammunition. All of the information put forth by our illustrious leaders has been politically motivated, and thus very exagerated.

The military has standards for penetration of certain hard objects at certain ranges by certain munitions. Their standards are very rigid and well defined. They have nothing to do with the civilian debate. The term has simply been miss-used to excite and inflame the public.

Our lawmakers dearly love to re-define accepted terms to fit their legislation. In this case, they came up with a new definition for "armor piercing". Pat is correct in that any modern rifle round fits this new definition. If it penetrates that vest, it is "armor piercing" in a legal sense, despite the original meaning of the term. It has been re-defined for us. That re-definition created a lot of problems when it was realized what its full effect would be, so it was watered down to specifically name munitions that were never commonaly available anyway.

It may surprise some of you just what is capable of defeating this vest. While the vest will stop common hollow point and jacketed soft point handgun ammunition, and even most if not all ball ammunition, there is some decidedly low-tech stuff it won't.

Hard-cast lead alloy bullets fired from calibers such as the .44 Special, .44 Magnum, and .45 Colt will penetrate these vests every time. Cast from linotype, or common wheel weights and then quenched or heat-treated, these bullets typically can go into the low 20's on the Brinell hardness scale. Heavy for caliber designs in the 250-320 grain range driven as low as 900 fps will typically penetrate BOTH sides of the vest.

In other words, I can take an 1870's vintage .45 Colt, loaded with black powder and shooting a very hard lead bullet and shoot right through both sides of a 21st century kevlar vest. I have done it myself on a couple of occasions. The technology to defeat these vests is as old as the self-contained metalic cartridge. So where does that leave us?

Clearly there are elected leaders, and others, who would like to take all of our guns away. So what have they done here? It's a tried and true (and unfortunately effective) tactic to demonize some form of firearm or ammunition. It's better if you can attach some miss-applied buzz word and make it stick. "Assault rifle" - there are virtually no selective-fire weapons in civilian hands, and they simply do not show in crime statistics. "Saturday Night Special" - a special class of cheap gun, somehow inherently more evil than other guns because it is cheap. "Sniper Rifle" - as applied to .50 BMG rifles used by long-range match competitors and also never used in crimes. "Cop Killer Bullet" - a special armor piercing (first re-define that term) round used to kill officers, also never used by criminals. Apply these scary terms, promote them to the public as a menace, and take another slice out of gun ownership. We cannot let them keep going like this.