flashlight

2948 readers

16 users here now

Portable illumination

Rules:

Be excellent to each other
Don't be the reason we need to make more rules

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Adair21

Zak

Cop-flashlights eating bullets by accident. (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/flashlight

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've heard of a lot of stories where cops will get into a shootout with criminals, and their flashlights end up stopping at least one bullet.

Has anyone else ever heard of such a thing happening?

Donut operator is a youtuber that's talked about that many times.

If anyone has some old aluminum flashlights that don't work anymore and you also have guns, maybe make a video testing how bullet proof they are?

I mean, obviously, high velocity AP rounds would destroy almost anything, but the common calibers for magazine feed pistols and even some common calibers for magazine feed rifles are stopped by the average tactical flashlight.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

How much rigor do you expect?

If you don't mind an absence of rigor, my family shoots out back of my uncle's farm, and has for longer than I've been alive (and I'm so old, I offered King Tut a cold drink once). We've used all kinds of dumb shit as targets, including some maglites back in the day.

They can either stop or vastly reduce any damage from handguns, including 45, 357, and 44. 9mil is kinda meh at penetrating anything metal, even with ball ammo.

Rifle rounds, we didn't tend to have anything much punchier than 308, but that stuff went through at least the front half of aluminum like that. Hard to know if it would have done more, since flashlights standing on a board don't exactly have the same mass behind it to keep it from just being knocked over.

I wanna say 7.62×54 went through the same thickness of steel, but it might have only been partially, we're all older now, so it's been a while since we shot stuff just to see if it could take a bullet. It's more about hanging out and practicing nowadays.

I know 30-30 went through a similar thickness steel slab, and I wanna say someone punched through clean with 273.

Tbh though, any hunting round should be able to get through that thickness of metal, afaicr.

I can believe that a handgun round fired sloppy could easily be stopped by a maglite. If someone did have video, I would be more surprised if it went deep enough to even get all the way through the casing of the light on of side.

The curvature should help some anyway.

Again, that's all low rigor shooting for fun, not serious testing with controls in place and careful measurements, so take it with a grain of salt (or powder, if you prefer)