Bullet Reflection Angles Off Hard Surfaces

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. It's important that we think about construction materials and the actual environment that we're going to be operating in. When we have to defend ourselves in public, you know if you're inside of your home, or if you're in an open area then construction materials, won't stop bullets. And probably won't even allow bullets to skip off of them with very much recourse. You have to think about backgrounds and cover and depth of penetration and things like that. But shooting in the real world especially in an urban environment or a public venue like a shopping area, or maybe an alleyway or a street scene, we have congested buildings often made of much harder materials than your home. You do have to worry about things like the effects of cover. And of course, what bullets are going to do when they skip off of, or hit those hard surfaces. If you walk into a dynamic critical incident inside of this kind of an environment Stay down! Let's think about this environment for a second. Here I am amidst brick, steel doors, concrete or asphalt. Bullets are not going to be absorbed by these entities. And the angle of attack from the bullet strikes from either me or from other threats in the area. Aren't predictably going to react the way a lot of people think they will. In fact, they're going to come really close to following these surfaces. When you end up with a perpendicular hit the same thing's going to happen but it's certainly possible that a right angle from this or from a doorframe causes that to follow another surface. If that person shot over my shoulder, it's entirely possible at a strike on a steel door, came over to a steel frame and came right back and actually strikes me in the back. Now, of course, a lot of the energy is going to be absorbed by these hard surfaces, but let's go up to the square range and really take a look and see what's going to happen when real bullets hit real solid surfaces. We talked about shooting in realistic environments. It's important to understand the way the bullets are going to behave in the real world. When we shoot at paper, shooting at dirt berms. We don't get to really take account for what's going to happen when a bullet strikes a solid surface. When we see intermediate barriers that don't stop bullets like drywall or hollow core interior doors or trees and plants and things like that that are of a smaller diameter, and bullets just pass through. We really don't get an appreciation for what happens when those bullets strike those solid surfaces like brick or steel or granite or concrete or even asphalt on a horizontal surface. We see what happens when bullets actually skip off. We'll walk over here and take a look at what's going on with this target. Would this being the corner of a building maybe, it's a very flat hard surface like granite or maybe it's a sheet metal surface like a van or a building or something like that. What we want to understand is that we need to use cover properly when our tactical considerations shooting in a realistic environment, we wouldn't want to extend past the cover with our gun hand or with our body to where if we're addressing a threat out in this direction, we end up exposed to what's going to come off of this surface and the angle of incident as it comes off of the surface really isn't relative to the angle of attack as we're going to see, it has a lot more to do with the construction of the bullet material and the construction of the surface that's being struck. For this demonstration this is a very controlled environment. We're going to use a heavy jacketed lead round, which we normally don't use in this training environment because we want to cut down what actually happens when rounds skip off of surfaces. So normally we'd be using frangible rounds again this demonstration we're using a heavy jacketed lead bullet. And this is mild steel that we're shooting up against the kind of steel you might encounter in an industrial environment. But more importantly it's going to show you the extreme effects of skip off of a solid surface. This is not a demonstration you should try to recreate. There is a danger of the material coming back off of certain right angles, or even sliding up this way. And we have safety things in place over here to protect the people that are going to be downrange. Whenever we give this demonstration for a room full of students. So again, watch and learn. Let's not necessarily replicate because you're going to get the point right here. Of course, I'm going to put my safety glasses on. I have my hearing protection on, and I'm gonna demonstrate if that were my situation where I was standing next to the corner of the building and a round where to go say, several feet to the left of that target at approximately a 45 degree angle into that steel. You see where the round struck and you see where the pieces of that round ended up. Now certainly a lot of the energy was absorbed by that steel, but that's going to significantly affect that target's ability to present a lethal threat. So if we think of that as being us we've got a real problem. Now that may be what you expected to see but most people wouldn't expect to be able to double that distance and have a very similar effect. And that's obviously a much sharper angle. As I shoot I'm going to close that angle closer and closer to 90 degrees and you'll see what happens against that target. And again on the second, stand. So, what we end up with is seeing that if we are using cover improperly or positioning ourselves, because of the circumstances near hard surfaces rounds can be flying significantly away from areas that would normally impact us, but they would still have a significant effect on our ability to present a threat or a defense towards that threat. If we take a look and see all the impacts on this target granted they're not full speed, high-impact bullets coming from the muzzle directly to us and a lot of the energy absorbed by that solid surface. But these things will still hurt. They'll still cut. They'll still lacerate. Even if I was standing back here and coming like this, all of that laceration on my hand would certainly affect my ability to defend myself. So we want to use cover properly. We want to be very aware of what's going to happen to bullets when they strike solid surfaces. And of course this happens on a horizontal plane also, coming off of concrete or asphalt or other similar materials. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.