Pistol vs. Active Shooter With Body Armor And A Rifle? Myths & Facts

Let’s get real.  Very few people want to be in a gunfight.  Even special operations works hard to avoid “gunfights.”  They’ll set up ambushes at the time and place of their choosing where they can use speed, surprise, and violence of action, sniping, indirect fire, grenades, charges, and flash bangs to minimize the chances of a true toe-to-toe fight.

A “fight” implies that the playing field is level and that effective fire is going in both directions.

If you do get into a gunfight, you want intel, armor, overwatch, long guns, an assortment of grenades, and a trained team that can shoot, move, and communicate.

You don’t want to get into a gunfight alone, armed with a pistol.  Ever.  Against ANY gun.

That being said, I believe that you should train for that worst case scenario.

Why?

Because if you only train for averages, extreme situations will shove you out of your comfort zone.

But if you train for the extremes, average situations will take care of themselves.

What about body armor?

Body armor does a few things, but one of the biggest things that soft body armor does is that it changes the impact point from being the tip of the bullet to being about the size of a tennis ball.  Plates can increase the impact point to roughly the size of the plate.

You still absorb almost all of the energy of the bullet…just over a bigger area.  Instead of getting a hole poked in you, it’s like getting jabbed with the end of a baseball bat.  A PJ friend of mine has taken multiple AK rounds to the chest.  He says that feels like he imagines it would feel to have someone take a swing at your chest with a baseball bat.  He obviously lived, but he didn’t laugh it off.

With soft body armor, it’s common for people to be shocked and freeze for a couple of seconds, get the wind knocked out of them, have ribs broken, etc.

Rated body armor allows for the body armor to deform 44mm into the body.  This shows roughly what that would look like…imagine that indention going into your rib cage.

Practically, that means that the ribs are getting pushed in enough to displace the heart.

One common saying is that soft body armor is designed to keep you alive.  Hard body armor is designed to keep you in the fight.

So, just because an attacker has soft body armor on doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start by shooting center mass.

That first hit will, at least, interrupt their OODA loop and may cause them to freeze momentarily.  As we’ve repeatedly seen, most murderers slow down or completely stop at the first sign of effective resistance.

Should you stop there?  No.  There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but that first shot to the vest could easily be thought of as a jab…you may get lucky and it may finish the fight, but more than likely it’s going to set up your next shot(s)…

One of the purposes of a center-mass shot on a moving attacker is to slow down the head.  Shooting an active shooter wearing a vest center mass may allow you to follow up with a headshot, if necessary.

Don’t want to take the head shot?  Thighs and hips are a perfectly viable option to stop a threat.  They’re not as effective as the upper chest and head, but every time you put another round into an attacker, the more likely you’ll interrupt their OODA loop and stop them from continuing their assault.

A shot to body armor may allow you to close distance.

It may allow you to get to cover.

But whatever you do, don’t let the presence of body armor on a bad guy make you think that he’s invincible.  You have to have the attitude that you’re going to come out on top.

5 Little Known Facts about Bad Guys & Body Armor

Some bad guys have good armor and good fitting armor, but bad-guy body armor tends to be different (sometimes VERY different) than good-guy body armor.  This can be huge…

1. Police body armor should all be NIJ tested and certified.  Many departments destroy their armor when it reaches end-of-life.  As a result, civilian body armor that bad guys tend to buy tends to be inferior to “real” body armor.  That means that a bad guy may be wearing body armor designed to stop a .44 magnum, but your 9mm may cause enough back-face deformation to seriously injure him, break ribs, and change behavior.  Notice the use of the words “tends to” and “may.”  There are no guarantees.
2. Police body armor has very little margin around the edges where there is no protection.  Cheapo Chicom body armor can have as much as 2″ of non-ballistic plastic around the edge to make the armor cheaper/lighter.
3. Theoretically, a bullet could push body armor completely through the body and the body armor would have, technically, kept the bullet from passing through.  Back-face deformation is how much the armor pushes into you after the front is shot.  It is MUCH greater on bad-guy Chicom armor than police armor.
4. Steel plates are heavy, reduce mobility, and cause spalling if they don’t have enough anti-spalling covering.  Spalling is the ricochet that happens when the bullet hits something harder than itself, breaks up, and splatters.  It’s lead & copper.  When it goes into the neck/inside of the arm of the wearer, it can create an immediate change in behavior.  This is common when people buy cheap plates and attempt homemade anti-spalling coatings or don’t use any anti-spalling.
5. If the bad guy was sitting with body armor on, it’s likely that everything from their belly-button down is not covered when they’re standing.  This creates a larger target area when engaging the pelvis.

Prey vs. Predator

All active shooters are different, but I believe that all of them have a movie that’s played out in their head dozens of times where they dominate everyone around them and exert their will with impunity.  Their manifestos reveal some of this…even when they’re counting on being killed.

In their movie, they are the apex predator and everyone else is prey.  It’s like finishing a video game on the novice level and thinking you’re something special…until you run up against someone who actually knows what they’re doing..  And the notes that they leave ahead of time makes me think that most have either planned to run, commit suicide, or commit suicide by cop at the first sign of resistance.

It may not be 100% accurate, but that model explains why active shooters pick the targets they do and why they respond to resistance the way they do.

And I hope it encourages you to fight rather than freeze if you ever find yourself in an active shooter situation.  Flip the tables…decide not to be prey and take the fight to them.

What’s the biggest thing you can do to survive an active shooter situation if you’re armed with only a pistol and running isn’t an option?

It’s training so that your shooting skills become conditioned responses…reflexive…so that you can perform at a high level under extreme stress without having to think about it.  Humans rarely, if ever, “rise to the occasion” in life or death stress.  They revert back to what they trained or they behave unpredictably if they didn’t train.

Is that important to you?

After recent attacks, do you see how some nut could do the same thing at your school, church or another event you’re at?

Do you want to develop the skills that will let you make effective hits on target with a pistol at longer-than-bad-breath distances in a fraction of the time as what’s possible with live-fire-only training?

Than I want to strongly encourage you to check out our Dynamic Gunfight Training.  You’ll be thankful you did.

Using normal methods, it takes thousands of rounds of live fire and hundreds of hours to develop reflexive shooting skills, but with our at-home training that incorporates more than a dozen accelerated learning hacks, you can do it in only minutes a day for a fraction of what it would cost with traditional range training.

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