Home defense is one of those areas that’s filled with paradoxes and degrees of misunderstanding. Many times, we’re concerned simply with the end result of stopping a threat, but what’s often disregarded is the behavior of bullets inside a closed structure.
I’ve had the opportunity to perform detailed testing on materials over the years, and through this, I’ve come to a better understanding of just what bullets do when presented to common home construction materials. My opinions here are the result of what I learned—and some of it may surprise you.
COMMON MYTHS
Before we get into this topic in detail, I do want to go about dispelling some myths that surround bullets on impact. In general, we aren’t going so far as to talk about what you see in Hollywood, where bullets are largely harmless to main characters and typically just pepper the ground at their feet. What mass media has accomplished isn’t necessarily spreading false information as much as creating a set of perceived capabilities that, in many cases, just don’t exist.
The main myth you should understand is that, due to the magic of movies, common materials are perceived to be much stronger than they actually are. Bullet impact on material is almost always simply for visual effect to show that someone is shooting. The old tropes of simply flipping over the bar table or standing behind a car door works well for cinematic purposes but, in reality,
