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Cop-flashlights eating bullets by accident.

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.

9 comments

ShunkW

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Sure seems like some solid copaganda

EmperorHenry

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I mean, I'm not so sure of how many cops are trash, whatever the real percentage is, it makes them all look bad, "one bad apple spoils the barrel"

because of the portion of cops that break the law, now the trust in all cops is ruined.

But I've seen a lot of bodycam videos where cops that are about to commit mis-conduct are stopped from doing so by other cops and actually punished for it. Audit the Audit is one channel on youtube that's very critical of cops that break the law, but he also points out when the one getting arrested is actually in the wrong.

felixwhynot

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I’ve heard the term used that it’s a “bad barrel” as in, the police system as it stands is so easily abused by cops that it’s less a matter of a “bad apple” since they’re all in the same barrel. Food for thought.

southsamurai

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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)

setsneedtofeed

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I've got reliable knowledge of handguns, optics, and full magazines all eating incoming bullets. It doesn't seem absurd that a flashlight on a belt or vest pouch to eat a bullet especially considering the random hodgepodge of low powered rounds (.22lr, .25, .32, .380 as examples) that seem popular in crime. I'd totally put rifles or even 9mm out of mind, as various low power pistol rounds (somewhere in the ballpark of 200j of energy) would be more likely to be stopped, and that's what I'd test if doing backyard science. I don't have a specific instance of a flashlight stopping a round on hand, but it's a metal object claimed to be blocking a potentially low energy incoming round, seems plausible.

solrize

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Light sabers are the best for that. They do sometimes get confused with flashlights.

EmperorHenry

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Actually, there are guns in the starwars that fire solid bullets instead of laser bolts. The Tuskens on tattooine use guns like that (the "sand people")

A lot of bounty hunters and assassins hired to kill jedi will use them because the bullet will turn molten as the jedi tries to block it and ends up hitting them anyway.

In-universe guns that fire solid projectiles are called "slug throwers" and as you probably already know, guns that fire laser bolts are called "blasters"

Drusas

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Don't get your info from idiots on YouTube. Or idiots on TikTok. Or whatever is next.

EmperorHenry

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I just watch the uncut bodycam stuff most of the time, I mentioned Donut Operator because he's one of the people I watch too, he showed some police-issue flashlights that were definitely broken, but they stopped a bullet that probably would've been fatal