Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

January 28, 2011

After the recent assassination attempt on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in front of a Tucson supermarket -- in which she was seriously wounded and six people, including a federal judge, were shot to death -- an impassioned, angry debate erupted on cable TV and in the blogosphere. Some argued for stricter gun control laws, particularly when it comes to technology such as high-capacity ammunition clips that make killing more efficient. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, some argued that the best answer is to loosen regulation even more so that more ordinary citizens -- and even members of Congress -- can arm themselves and carry their weapons whenever possible.

Both positions have certain flaws. Realistically, there isn't the political will to impose stricter gun control on a society that's already the most heavily armed in the world. A 2007 international study estimated that Americans owned roughly 270 million of the world's 875 million firearms, which worked out to close to one firearm per American. Thanks to decades of lax regulation, some of those weapons have passed through so many hands, sans documentation, that even figuring out who has them would be a nightmare.

Conversely, packing your own heat for protection may seem like an appealing idea. After all, it worked so well for Charles Bronson in Death Wish that they made three sequels.
In reality, though, there's little evidence that it really offers much protection. A National Rifle Association web article, quoting an online database in which armed citizens post reports of having repelled attackers, cites about 4,100 defensive uses of firearms over a recent seven-year period. That works out to approximately 586 successful acts of armed self-defense annually, which is slightly less than the number of people who typically kill themselves or someone else by accident, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's database of fatalities by cause. While some gun advocates say self-defense uses are underreported, a 2000 study in which Harvard researchers interviewed gun owners similarly found only a small number of successful uses of guns for protection.

Why are there so few instances of gun self-defense when so many people are armed? One reason is that having a gun in your pocket doesn't mean that you're adept at using it when the time comes. According to Kevin Michalowski, author of The Gun Digest Book of Guns for Personal Defense, it takes an estimated 7,000 repetitions to perfect most physical skills, and gun combat is no exception. As journalist William Saletan notes in this Slate article, an armed citizen who rushed to the scene in Tucson came within a trigger pull of mistakenly shooting one of the heroes who disarmed the would-be assassin. "I was very lucky," conceded the man, who said that he lacked professional gun training.

Another limitation of guns is that, unless you kill or disarm your attacker successfully, they don't actually protect you from being hit by bullets. Gabrielle Giffords was incredibly lucky to survive, because 95 percent of the 20,000 or so Americans shot in the head each year don't, according to this 2006 Baltimore Sun article. But as this HowStuffWorks article details, you're also in trouble if you get hit in the torso, especially if the projectile doesn't pass straight through you but strikes bone and is redirected within your body, exacerbating the amount of damage from its kinetic energy.

Since not getting killed by a bullet is the primary concern, it strikes me that we might be better off focusing on that specific issue.

Practically since the advent of firearms around 1500, people have been trying to devise protective gear that would neutralize their killing power. Back in 1538, Milanese master armorer Filippo Negroli was commissioned to make a bulletproof vest. In the 1600s, Oliver Cromwell's soldiers wore double-plated steel helmets and breastplates designed to absorb a bullet's energy and prevent penetration, as Cromwell himself is wearing in this portrait. But that gear was heavy and cumbersome, as were the cast-iron vests that some soldiers in the American Civil War bought from camp peddlers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, armorers experimented with bullet-proof vests fashioned from multiple layers of silk instead of metal. Those worked fairly well at absorbing the impact of the bullets used at the time, which moved at a relatively slow 400 feet per second. But gun-makers soon developed high-velocity projectiles that made the vests obsolete. During World War II, flak jackets -- lined with lighter aluminum plates or a new Fiberglas-and-cellulose resin composite developed by DuPont -- protected soldiers and airmen from shrapnel but still didn't stop bullets. In the mid-1970s, armorers switched to synthetic fibers such Kevlar. Synthetic-fiber vests were strong enough to stop bullets, yet light enough that police officers could wear vests in the streets. While that technology has saved thousands of officers' lives, some vests work better than others (as this National Institute of Justice website documents.) Moreover, it still doesn't prevent you from being killed from a shot to the head.

In recent years, however, some promising new bullet-stopping materials have emerged. In 2007, University of Michigan chemical engineering researcher Nicholas Kotov and colleagues bonded 300 alternating layers of clay and polymer to create a substance about the thickness of plastic wrap but incredibly strong. Last year, University of South Carolina engineering professor Xiaodong Li and collaborators in Switzerland and China recently figured out how to combine the cotton from an ordinary T-shirt with boron, the third-hardest material on the planet, to create a boron-carbide nanotube fabric that is light and flexible enough to be worn as an undergarment, yet theoretically tough enough to stop a bullet.

What if these next-generation protective materials were utilized to create a lightweight, flexible full-body hooded suit of body armor that covered the wearer from head to toe, with a protective visor to shield the eyes and face? It would look a little like the outfit that Woody Allen wore in the 1972 film spoof Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, but the embarrassment might be a small price to pay for personal safety. That is, at least until future gun makers come up with a handheld laser or microwave gun.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Image Credits: James F. Palka/ZUMA Press/Corbis | JOSE JACOME/epa/Corbis | Bettmann/CORBIS