Body armor limitations and considerations

    A lot of people consider getting body armor. It can take dozens of hours of research and somewhere between $500 and $1500 to get the right armor and carrier. Here’s 7 minutes and $0 that may help you avoid some or maybe even all of that. I’ll explain many of the drawbacks of body armor, but there’s also guidance to help you consider what you may want if you’re considering it for practical purposes. I’d like to help people avoid buyer’s remorse.

Usefulness

    Body armor serves one purpose. It prevents holes in your body where it’s easiest to cause rapid death or incapacitation. Parts of you are still very exposed, but it’s hard for someone to shoot you in the head, and if you get shot or stabbed in the pelvis or legs, you’ll be able to fight back or give the attacker’s description to others.

    That said, armor is a useful tool for things civilians mostly don't do. It’s great for if you have to subdue armed people every few months or so, but civilians don’t do that. We either flee or stop the threat, and that’s maybe once a year at best depending on your mileage.

    There are some exceptions of course.

•     valet attendants standing in front of a rack of 30 car keys

•     convenience store cashiers

•     security guards in the way of certain crimes

•     EMTs

•     health insurance CEOs 20 days after people find out their anesthesia will stop mid surgery

    Widely publicized terror attacks fuel a lot of interest in body armor, but you'd have to live about a million years to be likely to be shot by an active shooter. Picture wearing body armor for a million years.

    It’s a lot heavier than you may think. You might be very surprised. It’s so heavy and restricting it changes your personality and behaviors, and wearing extra pounds on your shoulders can cause health issues. Have you ever seen someone wearing a vest pick something up from the floor? Armor makes you want to leave it there for later, and it makes picking things up awkward. If you get the chance, watch someone in armor bend over or do everyday tasks. You may never see it, which is telling by itself, but if you do, it gives insight into what armor takes from you. Police sacrifice comfort at work while getting paid huge sums of money. (Armored car drivers and EMTs sacrifice comfort for tiny sums of money.) They don’t wear it to run errands or go out to dinner.

Reducing the need

    There are much more effective ways to avoid holes in your torso. Armor is for those who can’t avoid violence with deescalation, being nice in traffic, avoiding dangerous places and people, increasing situational awareness, or fleeing.

    Mobility beats armor. If you can flee, flee. Armor is all but unnecessary if you can, and it even reduces your mobility.

    Sometimes you can’t avoid an attacker - you don’t see an attack coming, there’s nowhere to flee to, it’s a targeted attack, or other unfortunate examples. What remains is running toward the hole-maker, or being unable to avoid the hole-maker.

Plates

    Plates are an option if your circumstances permit you to openly wear armor. They’re mostly just good for one thing - kicking a door down and dominating a room with violence with four people when the 5th person in you group is a paramedic.

    If you’re ambushing a shooter, you’ll try to make sure only to expose yourself so briefly that they can’t identify that you’re armored and adjust their aim, so they’ll aim for center mass. You’re counting on all of their shots missing by less than 5 inches or more than two feet, give or take, depending on which way they miss. They would need great aim with no skills (it’s a basic skill to shoot around armor), or very bad aim. That rules out a whole lot of shooters. If they’re good enough or close enough to hit you in the plate, they can almost as easily hit you below it or above it. And if they don’t hit you in the plate, you didn’t really need the plate.

    Plates don’t work against knife-wielding attackers in the slightest. An attacker can see your plates and aim everywhere but the plate, reaching most of your vitals. Hands-on fighting with a plate carrier would put you at a significant disadvantage because you have about a dozen easily-accessible handles strapped tightly to your torso.

Coverage

    Your head, neck, armpits, lower mid-section, pelvic area, and legs are exposed, and without wraparound armor, your entire sides are exposed.

Concealable armor

    Even “concealable” armor isn’t fully concealable. People who are around you long enough will identify it sooner or later, depending on how many layers you’re wearing, the movements you make, their kinesthetic intelligence, and how much attention they’re paying you.

    On top of the societal reasons to conceal your armor, overt armor loses its usefulness on a civilian. If an attacker knows you’re wearing a vest, they can target your lower mid-section, pelvic area, head, neck, or upper legs, which can all reliably cause death (albeit more slowly).

    Overt armor is effective for police or groups of armored people because while fatal injuries are easy to impart even on an armored person, rapid incapacitation is harder, and it’s common knowledge that if you try to kill a cop, you’ll die very quickly or go to prison. An attacker may not believe they’ll die or go to prison if they attack one armored civilian, so you don’t get the benefit of that deterrence.

Soft armor

    Soft armor is generally rated for handguns or stabs. There are panels rated for both, but they’re thick and hard to conceal. For reference, a lot of police vests are rated for both, and you can see why that would be hard to wear comfortably and to conceal. There are also more and more rifle-rated soft armor technologies coming out, but most are very thick and prohibitively expensive.

    There are carriers that are either overt or covert, and there are panels that are more or less designed for one or the other. There are carriers designed for “both,” but being suited for both makes it good for neither. There’s wraparound soft armor which covers a lot of your upper body. There are also soft panels that don’t cover your sides, but they’re still larger than hard plates in length and width. They’re also cheap and easy to buy.

    So, for the most concealable and wearable option, most people would consider either handgun or stab armor. For the sake of this article I’m not going to argue that bullet-rated soft armor won’t work for knife and awl attacks. The fact is, for many stabbing attacks, it’ll probably work just as well as stab-rated armor, which is to say, it’ll stop the first stab (because nobody’s using an awl, and they’re unlikely to use their full strength if they think it’s just skin). If they give up, great. But wouldn’t a determined attacker instantly realize you’re wearing armor and then stab you somewhere below your belly button instead?

    I think it’s worth keeping in mind that soft armor doesn’t work for a whole lot of threats - fists, clubs, sprays, rifles, vehicles, thrown objects, choking, crushing. While some of these are very rare (rifles and crushing), most of them are far more common than knife and handgun attacks.

    If you've made up your mind to purchase soft armor, then check the reviews and websites of your local body armor stores, pick the best one that has various brands and types you might consider, and see if they sell to civilians. I encourage you to get fitted at a store. You’ll save money by buying something online, but for your $800 purchase, it’s worth the extra $100 just to be able to try on a few different vests and to get measured by someone who sizes people for armor daily and stands to waste time and money if you end up returning it within 30 days. Level II wraparound handgun armor in a concealable carrier is a good option.

Is gear the answer?

    People sometimes think gear is the answer while ignoring knowledge, training and skills. Have you taken self defense, martial arts, AVERT, AVAST, any online active shooter trainings, STB, CPR/AED, WFA, TECC? Do you carry an IFAK? Have you read Left of Bang? Have you talked to your friends and family about what to do in certain scenarios? All of that put together is less than the cost of body armor, and if you really need body armor, you still need all of that stuff, too.

Trainingamid 

Gear recommendations