Bulletproof Vest: Difference between revisions

In real life, however, low-level vests like those issued to police officers are only rated to stop small-caliber handgun rounds. Higher-caliber munitions require hard ceramic plates which are often shattered upon impact. Even if the vest stops the bullets from penetrating your body, you might sustain broken ribs and some nasty bruises. After all, a bullet does impart '''a lot''' of kinetic energy on impact. To put in simpler terms, being shot with your armor on often feels like being hit by a truck.

And don't forget, when someone does get shot when wearing a vest, has been mistaken for dead, gets emotionalized over and then sits up with a bewildered look on their face, they will always, ALWAYS part their shirt to reveal the vest, usually with bullets showing in it.

{{quote|'''Pulveriser''': Bet you punks can't hit the skull!

'''Pulveriser's VO Box''': I won the bet. My medical bills told me that after criminals, doctors would be the next to go. }}

* Other instances can be explained by the fact that Frank has unbelievable pain tolerance.

* In all three editions of ''[[Battle Royale]]'' (Book, film and manga) the bullet proof vest acts as one of the strongest items in the event, saving the lives of the people who carry it numerous times.

== Film ==

* In ''[[Back to The Future]]'', Doc Brown gets shot up at the beginning of the movie. After Marty [[Time Travel|time travels]] back to the 1955, he keeps trying to warn him, but Doc refuses, citing the integrity of the space-time continuum. Marty travels back to the present... just in time to see Doc get shot again. Marty runs over, mourning him... but, of course, Doc finally took the warning, and was wearing a Bullet Proof Vest. In the third movie, [[Genre Savvy]] Marty hides a stove door under his shirt to survive a gun duel, in homage to ''A Fistful of Dollars.''

** The stove piece is actual Truth in Television. During the era of the Wild West outlaws and sheriffs would occasionally don makeshift vests, and "iron shirt" if they heard an enemy was in town. The armor was typically the strongest flattest piece of steel or iron around, the back plate of a stove happened to be the perfect shape for this.

* In ''[[Kick-Ass (film)|Kick-Ass]]'', [[Training From Hell|the introductory scene for Big Daddy and Hit Girl]]. Later she mentions that she wears kevlar all the way down to her underwear.

* A fantasy version appears in ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'', in the Mines of Moria. Frodo appears to be fatally stabbed by a cave troll, but soon after reveals that he's wearing an impenetrable shirt of [[Mithril]] beneath his coat. This also happens in the book, though he is stabbed by an orc and suffers a greater injury from the impact.

* Notably averted in ''[[Black Hawk Down]]'', when the US soldiers remove the reinforced steel plate from their kevlar body armor before the mission to lighten their load. Because past experience had led them to assume that they would not be fired upon, the soldiers chose to sacrifice protection for maneuverability. Ultimately they find themselves in a heavy fire-fight and suffer casualties that might have been prevented by the steel plating. Ultimately the real event helped create a restructuring of military policy that prohibits soldiers in combat zones from leaving behind their assigned equipment, though some still do.

* In ''[[Battle Royale]]'', one student is gunned down by Kiriyama and collapses, apparently dead. The moment Kiriyama's out of sight, however, the victim jumps to his feet and gleefully declares that he's been saved by his awesome bulletproof vest. It turns out that Kiriyama was hiding nearby while stalking someone else; he hears this and uses a katana to slice the student's head off. Kiriyama then puts on the bulletproof vest, which somehow protects him from being stabbed.

* In ''[[Training Day]]'', where one of the crooked cops is shot in the bulletproof vest in order to set up a crime scene. Unfortunately, they realize a few seconds later that some bullets got through the vest. Since Alonzo is a dick, he insists they finish getting their stories straight before doing anything about it.

* In ''[[Assassins (film)|Assassins]]'' (1995), the villain Rath thinks he's killed a man who turns out to have faked his death. The man knew where Rath would be shooting from and with what weapon, so he wore a vest capable of stopping the bullet. A bulletproof glass divider in a taxi cab later provides a realistic [[Gunpoint Banter]] moment.

* ''[[Shooter]]''. FBI agent Nick Memphis is shot by a sniper, then (after Bob Lee counter-snipes the shooter) gets up and removes a steel trauma plate from under his overcoat, saying "I think I broke a rib." Snipers aim for center of mass, especially at such ranges, so Memphis must have relied on the professional sniper being able to hit him accurately.

* ''Running Scared'' (1986). One of the protagonists is going to retire and, getting nervous, starts wearing a bulletproof vest. There's a stigma against wearing vests in the force, so he claims that it's because he's got a bad back. His partner snarks him on it, until an accidental discharge causes ''him'' to go for a vest, whereupon the issuing sergeant says: "Let me guess, you've got a bad back too."

* Played straight in ''[[District 9]]''. Wikus is hit while [[Storming the Castle|infiltrating MNU]]. After he kills the offending shooter (leading to a [[Crowning Moment of Funny]]), he looks at the bullets left in his vest.

* The final battle scene in ''[[Mr. and Mrs. Smith]]'' has both protagonists take multiple bursts from submachine guns and close-range rocket strikes and they suffer almost no ill effects whatsoever. These vests are borderline [[Pocket Protector|Pocket Protectors]] as neither character takes any hits to their arms or legs.

* In ''The Evil That Men Do'' Charles Bronson shoots a CIA man with a shotgun, only for him to get up again. This time Bronson shoots him in the face.

* In ''[[Super Troopers]]'', one of the troopers insists on testing a bulletproof '''jockstrap'''. ''While wearing it.''

{{quote|'''Chief''': You're a sick fucker, Mac.

'''Mac''': Thanks, Chief! }}

* Subverted in ''[[Epoch Evolution]]'', where the mercenary leader shoots {{spoiler|Tower}} twice in the stomach. When asked about the bullets, he replies that his vest only stopped one. Realizing that they won't be able to get him medical attention, {{spoiler|Tower}} asks to be read [[The Bible]] one last time. He dies from bleeding a few minutes later.

* ''[[The Avengers (1998 film)|The Avengers 1998]]''. After Mrs. Peel's clone shoots him, Steed reveals that his Trubshaw waistcoat is bulletproof.

* In [[Sandy Mitchell]]'s [[Warhammer 40000]] [[Ciaphas Cain]] novel ''For The Emperor'', [[Anti-Magic|Gunner Ferik Jurgen]] proves that imperial guard armor is not as useless as some people say: His helmet allows him to survive ''a bolter<ref>miniature rocket-propelled grenade</ref> shot to the head'', though it's made clear that a second shot would have [[Your Head Asplode|killed]] him (the helmet is destroyed). Granted, it was stormtrooper Carapace armor, not standard-issue Flak armor.

* In the [[Adam Hall]] spy novel ''[[Quiller|Quiller's Run]]'' the protagonist runs into a problem when he wears an anti-knife vest to a confrontation with a villainess who, up till now, has used knives -- only she [[Oh Crap|pulls out a revolver]] and blasts him six times in the chest. Fortunately the vest still stops the bullets.

* In the Harry Turtledove [[Alternate History]] novel ''The Guns of the South'' a Confederate soldier is surprised when one of the time travellers survives a musket ball to the chest because of what he calls a 'flak jacket'.

* Bubushka's life is saved twice by the bulletproof corset she wears under in her clothes in the [[Young Bond]] novel ''By Royal Command''.

* A few characters wear vests in [[Time Scout]]. It's a realistic portrayal in that only one character actually gets shot wearing them and when he does, it's with a handgun, and the force knocks him down and stuns him.

* The nightsilk garments of the ''Corean Chronicles'' series is impact resistant when worn in a skintight outfit, making a body stocking of this material effectively a set of bulletproof underwear. The material is very expensive though, so the reason the hero of the first trilogy can afford to wear it constantly is because his family manufactures it.

** Subverted earlier, when Detectives Bolander, Felton, and Howard were all seriously wounded despite their vests, by an insane gun-nut conspiracy theorist who "probably used Teflon bullets".

** In the non-fiction book on which the series is based, one of the detectives was wounded in the line of duty when he was shot through his department issue vest.

* Season two of ''[[Alias (TV series)|Alias]]'', when Jack, Irina and Sydney were in Kashmir. Jack is shot, is knocked to the ground. It turns out he was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he is on top of a [[Land Mine Goes Click|landmine]].

* A very unusual subversion in the ''[[Jonathan Creek]]'' episode "The Coonskin Cap", in which the police all wear bulletproof vests to persue an armed killer, only for one officer to be ''strangled'' in an [[Locked Room Mystery|empty room]]. Jonathan eventually realises {{spoiler|she was strangled by a device built into the vest itself}}.

* ''[[CSI: Miami]]'' features Calleigh getting shot and us discovering that she was wearing a (rather low-cut) vest, after the obligatory "Is she dead?" moment.

** ''[[CSI New York]]'' has featured Stella Bonasera's low-cut vest on a number of occasions.

* Kind of subverted in ''[[Walker, Texas Ranger]]'', where any main character who wears a bulletproof vest will take the shot, recoil, then continue, while any secondary character or redshirt will either have the round penetrate the vest anyway via "cop killer" armor piercing bullets or just get shot in the head instead.

** Played straight (and more realistically) in the last episode of the Chairman arc, when Trivette actually goes down from a shot to the chest. After about a minute of appearing to be dead, he manages to recover and get up. Body armor to the rescue!

* Subverted in ''[[The Shield]]'', when Shane is shot through a door during a raid, while wearing a kevlar vest. He is knocked down by the impact, and sustains heavy bruising from the impact (it's noted in the show that the door slowed down the bullet, which prevented him from sustaining broken ribs on top of the bruising).

* In an early episode of ''[[Super Sentai|Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger]]'', Commander Doggie "Boss" Kruger is shot right as he returns home from an off-world Deka meeting by [[Monster of the Week]] Gigantes (AKA [[Hoji/Deka Blue|Deka Blue]]'s old friend Vino), immediately after Hoji realizes what Gigantes was up to. Fortunately, he was wearing a [[Bulletproof Vest]] and survived little less for wear (it's implied that Hoji warned Swam about Gigantes and she alerted Doggie just in time), though considering how he's shown to be [[Made of Iron]] in later episodes, one wonders if he really needed it...

* The sequence in ''[[24]]'' where Jack was forced to shoot Nina. She had fortunately been given a bulletproof vest before hand. Tony Almeida's line asking why this had happened (when he saw the giving on CCTV) was one that many a fan would ask when she was revealed to be [[The Mole]]. She did receive some bad bruising from being shot, though, giving the writers a reason for her to examine herself and thus a [[Lingerie Scene]]. In addition, Jack was shot while wearing a vest in season four, where he and Secretary Of Defense James Heller are trapped behind a vehicle while terrorists are shooting at them. Once hit (in the shoulder), Jack exclaims that he's fine, and then keeps shooting.

* An episode of [[Crossing Jordan]] subverts the vest's effectiveness. A cop died when he got shot. {{spoiler|The bullet bounced around inside his body because it couldn't penetrate the vest}}.

* Averted in Flashpoint: {{spoiler|Jules}} gets shot with by a sniper, and nearly dies. Averted again in the Season 3 finale, when {{spoiler|Ed}} is shot several times while wearing a vest and has to be hospitalized.

** Parodied another time where the department is testing new bulletproof vests. Suffice it to say, the shot landed elsewhere.

* ''[[Private Schulz]]''. On his first mission, Schulz's commanding officer proudly boasts that their car is completely bulletproof, which comes in useful later on when British agents start shooting at them...except the man with the car keys gets killed outside the car, preventing them from driving away. Fortunately ex-con Schulz knows how to hot-wire the vehicle.

* Richard [[Castle]] has one, as do the NYPD cops he hangs out with, but nobody's been shot while wearing one. [[Tempting Fate|Not yet]] anyway.

** When Beckett says he doesn't have a vest, Castle breaks his out - and it says "writer" where the cops' say "police." It's actually returned several times!

== Video Games ==

* In ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'', the player can pick up protective helmets and vests which not only protect him from pistol rounds, but also from rifled rounds, shotgun blasts, explosives and laser guns! However, melee attacks still do a great deal of damage.

** Perfect Dark uses an energy shield that has the same effect though, except that it does block head shots.

* Similarly, ''XIII'' lets you and other characters wear vests and helmets to soak up extra damage. If you shoot an armored opponent to death, their armor will disintegrate, so sneaking up to take them down from behind is the best way to loot pristine armor.

* ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Chaos Theory'' actually plays this quite realistically; if Sam triggers two or more alarms, guards will don body armor and helmets. While the armor is relatively effective against his rifle and renders his pistol practically useless except for headshots below the helmets' brims, his knife goes straight through their armor, and his nonlethal unarmed attacks, which aim for the base of the skull or nose, still knock enemies unconscious.

* Just like in real life, kevlar armors in ''[[Counter-Strike]]'' do little more than increasing your firefight life expectancy from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. Kevlar helmets, meanwhile, are only effective against pistols and ''maybe'' against 5.56 mm rifles.

* In the ''X-COM'' games unarmoured soldiers will [[Redshirt Army|die with disgusting ease]]. Personal Armour and even Power Armour is available but by the time it's in use, most aliens are packing weapons which will still inflict lethal damage no matter how heavy the armour, and mobile nightmare objects the [[Demonic Spiders|Chryssalids]] ignore armour anyway.

** Primarily because the RNG is horrible/evil, and your soldiers can take up to ''200%'' of the listed damage shown in the UFOpaedia. On the other hand, they can also take ''0%'' of the listed damage, depending on what the RNG rolls. So your troopers can literally survive a point blank headshot without taking a single point of damage. Sometimes, the RNG only ever rolls 200s or 0s. This can lead to interesting situations where a soldier survives half a dozen heavy plasma shots only to get pinged to death by a plasma pistol shot the next turn.

* Daffy Duck advertises one in the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' episode ''The Stupor Salesman'' adding, "Guaranteed to get your money back if it fails to work!"

* Parodied in [[Robot Chicken]], where in the spoof of [[Police Academy]] and [[X-Men]] movies, one of the graduates shoots himself in the head after Xavier's introduction of the bulletproof uniforms. After which, Xavier says "Of course, they can only protect the parts of you that are covered."

* In ''[[Futurama]]'', in ''Bender's Big Score'', the lead nudist scammer wears a platinum doom-proof vest. So ''that's'' what the purple thing he was wearing was. Afterwards he regrets he hadn't been wearing doom-proof pants too.

** ''Futurama'' also has an odd moment when Fry becomes a cop and tries to foil Bender stealing the Maltese Liquor. The robot that predicted the robbery notes that it was a trap - then Bender gets shot by Fry accidently when his shot ricochets off the safe, and the predictor robot shoots Fry. However, it's really a sting to catch the predictor robot, since Fry reveals he's wearing a bulletproof vest, and Bender - opens his door to show his bulletproof vest with a bullet lodged in it on a clothes hanger.

{{quote|'''Stan:''' Oh, ha ha! Very funny guys! You're lucky I'm wearing my vest!!}}

** U.S. soldiers in Iraq have reported being hit by rifle fire and not knowing they were hit, due to the modern heavy body armor they are wearing. Many injuries are due to explosives, which pierce the armor, or more often, damage parts of the body which are not protected. The force of the blast also is not reduced by much, which can cause brain damage when the brain is bruised against the skull.

** The amount of American soldiers who were wounded instead of killed due to the effectiveness of their armor overwhelmed the capacity of military hospitals, leading to deplorable conditions in some. In one case that leaps to mind, a soldier lost both arms but survived three shots to the torso with just broken ribs.

** Many army medics in Iraq reported that soldiers who survived an IED blast would often have shrapnel injuries on the limbs that would stop in a very neat line where their body armor started.

** The latest trend in body armor? Ballistic shorts which provide coverage to the groin area. This being intended to address a [[Groin Attack|major problem]] for troops riding in vehicles that roll over landmines or IEDs. Various styles are being evaluated, including "[http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/ballistic-boxers-might-just-save-your-tail-1.122993 ballistic boxers]" to shorts made from more conventional body armor materials. [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Incredibly Lame Puns]] abound, obviously.

** When he was shot dead in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was wearing a silk bullet-proof vest. These vests were starting to become obsolete due to faster bullets, but the point was moot because he was shot in the throat.

** A new method of making silk layers in bulletproof vests was adopted by the Thai police, in an effort to reduce costs in having to import kevlar by using their own Thai silk instead.

* During the 1920s/30s, a typical bulletproof vest worn by a bank robber or bootlegger was just a vest with thick layers of cotton padding and cloth.

** These vests, up to 20 layers of cotton, with a few thin steel plates, were still quite effective against the standard issue .38 revolvers used by most police officers at the time. One rather well known hitman, ([[Irony|if anybody remembers his name please place it here]]), was killed while wearing one by a officer using a BAR, essentially a light machine gun.