There's only one way to test a bullet proof vest: with bullets. Of course, any vest worth its hefty price tag has already been certified by the National Institute of Justice, so you can be pretty confident it'll work. But just how much pain will you experience while having your life saved? And what if someone decides to subject your vest to more punishment than it's designed for? In the world of "bullet resistance" (no garment is truly bulletproof), the term overkill takes on special significance.
Roundup: Bulletproof Vests
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Even after 12 rounds,ballistic material was still shrugging off slugs with ease. The polo-shirt exterior stayed cool under fire, with only small holes that you'd have to get pretty close to — we're talkin' knife-range close — to notice.
Even James Bond's Q Branch might balk at the nearly 5-G price tag. The shirt doesn't really hide the armor underneath, so you're still gonna need that sketchy trench coat. So much for being inconspicuous. ,490, miguelcaballero.com
Roundup:
- 1/10A complete failure in every way
- 2/10Sad, really
- 3/10Serious flaws; proceed with caution
- 4/10Downsides outweigh upsides
- 5/10Recommended with reservations
- 6/10Solid with some issues
- 7/10Very good, but not quite great
- 8/10Excellent, with room to kvetch
- 9/10Nearly flawless
- 10/10Metaphysical perfection
The NIJ recognizes six levels of ballistic protection for body armor; IIIA is the highest rating a soft garment (one with no metal plates inside) can attain. Naturally, that's what we chose to test.
We began by the book, at the Oregon Ballistics Lab — one of five NIJ-certified facilities in the US. Instead of strapping the vests on an intern (author's note: that would be me) and emptying a clip, the folks at OBL mounted the armor on a 220-pound block of modeling clay and used a mechanized rig to punish each with six.44-caliber and six .357 rounds. No need to count cracked ribs; to gauge impact, we simply measured the resulting craters. The greater the deformation in the clay, the greater the deformation would be in your chest.
The NIJ tests were awesome, but this evaluation wouldn't be extreme if we didn't crank it up to 11. So we enlisted the help of a friend, Mac Castle, who has a firing range in his basement and was nice enough to go just a tad more, er, ballistic on our test subjects.
Castle subjected each vest to six more .44-caliber slugs, some of them 25 percent heavier than the .44s at OBL. The bullets did some ugly damage, but we never had a vest truly fail. Good thing, too; in this category, we like a bit of engineering overkill.
1. Bulletproof Body armor HQ Vest
2. Miguel Caballero Polo
3. BulletProofME.com Jacket Vest
WIRED Comes zipped inside a warm and comfy L.L.Bean jacket, making it easy to wear in public without blowing your cover/attracting the attention of Homeland Security. The lightest vest tested.
TIRED Ouch! Clay indentations were at least 25 percent deeper than with the others. One bullet did go clean through, but since it was close to a previous hit, official NIJ tests would have forgiven this failure. Good thing real-world gunshots are so thoughtfully spaced!
$760 as tested, bulletproofme.com
Bear photo: Andrew Zuckerman