A new nonpenetrating ballistic injury

Abstract

A new, nonpenetrating ballistic injury mechanism involving individuals protected by soft body armor is described. Experimental studies using laboratory animals have demonstrated that despite stopping missile penetration, the heart, liver, spleen, and spinal cord are vulnerable to injury. The rapid jolting force of an impacting bullet is contrasted with the usually encountered mechanisms producing blunt trauma injury. The experimental methodology used to assess a 20% increase in survival probability and an 80% decrease in the need for surgical intervention with a new soft body armor is reviewed. Five cases of ballistic assaults on law enforcement personnel protected by soft body armor are presented. Four emphasize the potentially lifesaving qualities of the armor, while the fifth indicates the need for torso encircling design. Hospitalization should follow all assaults, regardless of the innocuous appearance of the skin lesion and the apparent well being on the assaulted individual. Therapeutic guidelines for patient management are suggested. SINCE THE 1960's, an increasing number of police officers have been assaulted with firearms. Attempts against the lives of public officials have also marred this period, including the assassinations of a president, a presidential candidate, and a prominent civil rights leader. The handgun represents the most commonly used weapon in assults against police personnel. F.B.I. statistics for the ten year period from 1964 through 1973 showed that 74% of police fatalities involved handguns. The "common" handguns and "Saturday night specials" (.38, .380, .32, .25, .22 caliber) represented 81% of the handguns used in the fatal police assaults. 18 In 1973, a multi-institutional program, the US Army Land Warfare Laboratory (LWL) and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), was

Performance of an advanced combat helmet with different interior cushioning systems in ballistic impact: Experiments and finite element simulations

“…A ballistic impact on a helmet can generate peak head acceleration which may exceed the tolerance level of what the tissues can bear, thus causing irreversible damage to these tissues. Injuries to head can also occur when the bullet has sufficient energy to cause the interior helmet shell to come in contact with the underlying tissue and this is known as "rear effect" [2].…”

Ballistic helmets – Their design, materials, and performance against traumatic brain injury

“…The depth of this backface signature (a conical bulge) is required not to exceed a critical value. If the depth exceeds this value, the helmet shell can strike the skull, resulting in behind armor blunt trauma (BABT) (e.g., [18,124,17,65,110]). …”

Modeling Gunshot Bruises in Soft Body Armor with an Adaptive Fuzzy System

“…The visible bruise can change over time [19] at different rates based on sex, age, body fat [17], and medication [20]. So a bruise shows that a blunt impact occurred but need not show that internal injuries occurred [21], [22]. This can occur in sports injuries where soft tissue injuries can escape detection [23].…”

“…Then (18) (19) the convex coefficients are weighted volume ratios of the "fired" sets (20) where (21) Proof: The proof that centroidal fuzzy systems are conditional means follows from the ratio structure of the centroid and the boundedness and non-negativity of the set values of the combined set of "fired" then-part sets . Each input gives its own and thus its own output…”