Alright, to exaplin a bit better,
The show had some weird special on military equipment, and this episode was on DragonSkin. This is a body armor known for its flexibility - it’s made in overlapping plates which do bear some resemblance to reptilian scales. There was a bit of a pointless scandal a while back when the Dept of Defense told soldiers not to buy or wear it. Some people got upset, but the DoD pointed out that the armor wasn’t as good as the suits they handed out, and was not getting replaced.
Regardless. After some fairly interesting material on how it’s made (and it’s not bad stuff at all) and what it can protect against, they had the section I noted.
First, they made a weird shotgun-like thing. It had a big wave of compressed air pushing out the firing material through a tube. The tube was about the size of standard plumbing pipe - not huge, but much larger than a shotgun barrel (this is important).
To fill the barrel, they made a bunch of tiny shuriken (“ninja throwing stars”) about the size of a thumbnail. Now, something that size is not all that dangerous. Even actual shuriken are not particularly dangerous - suffice it to say no actual ninja would try and seriously harm or kill someone with one. They also put nails in.
To test their crap gun and body armor, they then made a cool gel mold of a human body, basically putting a clear plastic gell to cool around one of those life-size plastic skeletons they like to have in high school biology. This part was actually neat to watch, although they skimmed over the painstaking process of using the computer to make a 3D model of the human body (or maybe they got theirs from a software company). Once assembled, this will do a fairly good job of mimicking the human body’s response to impact and cuts.
So they get out their crap gun. And fire it. From 10 feet (they claimed, but it looked bloody like 4 to me). And, they make some cuts. Not particularly deep ones, either. Surface cuts. One shuriken sticks in the wound about a 1/4" deep. Not impressive. SO they shoot again. And again. And again. At least 5 times, and maybe more. And the end of it, the target has, at worst, a nail stuck about 1/2" inside.
Now, these were very unpleasant wound. They might get infected, even. And if you left it alone, for say, a coupla a days, you might bleed to death. But you’d probably clot up and have a nice ugly scar, and recover nicely.
Now, at that range, virtually any gun on the planet can kill you. Some very light calibers won’t, but pretty mcuh anything else will. Even a gut wound might well kill you. An actual shotgun would take your body apart if it was firing shot, and wound punch an 1" hole through your body if slug.
Then they were gonna run tests using the body armor for this crapgun (that’s the name, now: crapgun)? Of course it’s stop this stuff! A freaking pair of overalls might stop it!
I turned off the TV.
Huh? 