In more anti-everything wackiness from the Empire State, New York Democratic Congresswoman Grace Meng apparently wants to make it easier for criminals to shoot you. Meng has reintroduced legislation – for the third time – that would ban civilian body armor if it can defeat rifle ammunition.

Meng’s bill, H.R. 3247, which is titled the “Aaron Salter, Jr., Responsible Body Armor Possession Act,” would ban the “purchase, ownership, or possession of enhanced body armor by civilians.”

The bill defines enhanced body armor as having the ballistic resistance that meets or exceeds Level III standards as defined by the National Institute of Justice. Level III and Level IV are designed to stop rifle rounds. The legislation would also ban helmets and ballistic shields if they are Level III or greater.

Of course, Meng’s bill contains a carve-out for law enforcement and members of the military. There is also a grandfather clause for civilians who purchase armor before the bill takes effect. Currently, H.R. 3247 is stalled in the House Judiciary Committee. The bill has nine cosponsors, all Democrats, including five from New York.

Meng, a member of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, announced she was reintroducing the legislation on the two-year anniversary of the 2022 Tops Friendly Market grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York, during which the shooter, who was wearing body armor and a ballistic helmet, killed 10 Black customers and wounded three more.

The shooter, who wrote in a manifesto that his actions were racially motivated, was sentenced last year to 11 consecutive life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole. The bill was named in honor of Aaron Salter, Jr., a retired Buffalo police officer who got off several rounds but was killed during the mass murder.

“It should not be the case that anyone with internet access can purchase equipment designed to stop military-grade ammunition,” Meng said in a press release last week.

Officer Salter’s gallantry notwithstanding, Meng’s bill is an unconstitutional nightmare that will do nothing to reduce violent crime. Like all gun control initiatives, law-abiding Americans will be left unprotected, and criminals will continue to armor up despite any new law. In other words, it would make it even more difficult for good people to protect themselves.

Congresswoman Meng’s communications staff did not return calls seeking her comments for this story.

FBI Data Ignored

According to the FBI’s landmark study, “Active Shooter Incidents 20-Year Review, 2000-2019,” roughly 5% of the active shooters wore body armor during their mass murders – 16 of the 345 shooters – five at open areas, four at business open to the public, three at government buildings, two at high schools, and two at universities.

Neither Meng nor her cosponsor Congressman Timothy Kennedy, a Democrat representing New York’s 26th District, cited this FBI data in their press release announcing the bill’s reintroduction. Instead, they used another data source.

“According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have already been over 150 mass shootings in 2024,” their press release states.

The Gun Violence Archive has been debunked more than a dozen times just on this site alone. Even some in the gun-ban industry have moved on from the GVA and are using other, less-notorious data sources. The GVA uses an overly broad definition of a mass shooting, which creates inflated statistics designed to hoodwink the public. For example, according to the GVA’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition.

Mainstream Appeal

Body armor has increased dramatically in popularity. Millions of law-abiding Americans have incorporated flexible armor and/or plate carriers into their home-defense plans. Even Amazon now offers hundreds of options, although you need to shop carefully as many of the options are inferior Chinese designs.

No group has embraced body armor more than combat veterans, and there are millions of combat veterans. They wore plates overseas while defending this country. Now, they want a similar rig at home. Meng’s bill would stop all of this. There is no carve out for military veterans in her legislation, despite their valorous service.

Scott Burton, editor of the Netherlands-based industry newsletter Body Armor News, pointed out that most Americans purchase body armor solely for defensive applications.

“In shooting incidents, the instinctive target for many individuals is often the largest and most visible body part: the chest,” Burton said Monday. “Body armor, as a protective measure worn over this vital area, can therefore prove highly effective during shooting incidents.”

Burton was not sure how many sets are sold each year to law-abiding civilians, but believes the numbers are high.

“Estimating the exact figure is difficult. However, I am sure that tens of thousands of ballistic vests are being purchased by civilians annually. Perhaps even a hundred thousand,” he said.

An Infringement

Industry experts point out that body armor is protected by the Second Amendment, and Meng’s bill is a clear infringement.

“As body armor is basically used for personal protection and self-defense, we think banning it would violate the Second Amendment,” Burton said. “A successful ban on body armor could potentially serve as an initial step toward implementing stricter regulations on firearms.”

They point to the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that Americans have a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and protection in their home. Banning law-abiding Americans from purchasing another means of self-defense would infringe upon their Second Amendment rights.

Besides, most states have already enacted laws regulating body armor that do not infringe on anyone’s constitutional rights.

  • Arizona makes it illegal to wear body armor during the commission of a crime by adding additional charges and penalties.
  • Arkansas allows civilians to purchase body armor unless they have been convicted of a felony.
  • California bans convicted felons from owning body armor, which is already federal law.
  • Delaware makes it illegal to wear body armor during the commission of a crime.
  • Florida makes it illegal to wear body armor during the commission of a crime, and anyone can make a purchase unless they have been convicted of a felony.
  • Hawaii allows civilians to purchase and wear body armor unless they have been convicted of a felony.
  • Massachusetts makes it a felony to wear body armor during the commission of a crime. Anyone can purchase body armor unless they have a felony conviction.
  • New Jersey allows anyone to purchase body armor unless they have a felony conviction. If it is used during a crime, prosecutors can add separate charges and penalties increase.

Takeaways

From a tactical perspective, Congresswoman Meng’s legislation is a headscratcher. She believes Americans deserve protection from handgun rounds, but not rifle ammunition.

How does this make sense?

There is little doubt that Meng resurrected her body armor ban for a third time without some input from the White House, specifically the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which is orchestrating Joe Biden’s war on our guns.

Given all of the convicted criminals, military-age males and terrorists Biden has allowed to cross our border unmolested, rather than backing a ban, perhaps the administration should consider issuing plate carriers to every law-abiding American. We are going to need them eventually. It’s only a matter of time.

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50 COMMENTS

  1. Any time, anyone, tries to outlaw personal safety gear, it should be a clear indication to anyone paying attention that the so-called ruling class has, as one of its greatest desires, the wish to render YOU defenseless. This has nothing to do with crime, it has to do with them and their desire to exercise absolute control over you and your life.

    They don’t want you to have a gun because, if you had one, you could shoot them, and they don’t want you to have armor because you might survive when they shoot you.

  2. Anything that makes the individual and more efficient operator when it comes to working within the scope of the second amendment is protected. This would include all firearms, magazine capacities, all types of ammunition and support equipment, such as night vision, body armor, suppresses, incendiary/distraction devices etc..

    • It’ll be outlawed for the outlaws too it’s just that the outlaws seem to be the only ones who believe in the right to bear arms Shall not be Infringed.
      Besides, according to the BATFE we are all outlaws anyway.

  5. Look, I don’t even want body armor, but I’m here in Washington State and I didn’t want all these extra standard capacity magazines and AR lowers either.

    When will these dipwads get it that prohibition doesn’t work and only exacerbates the problem?

    • Never, because they don’t really care about the problems that these laws purport to solve. The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. If you haven’t come across that phrase, I suggest you drop it in your favorite search engine is. Once you understand that, it all makes sense.

    • Word. I wasn’t even interested in firearms until California tried banning all semi-auto long guns a few year back. I’m guessing they’re completely ignorant of the secondary effects of their legislation attempts at inflating the number of guns in circulation.

  7. Meng is a chinese surname, she’s a pinko CCP spy if you ask me which makes sense to me why she’d push for this “law”

    • Another “little pink” advancing the CCP’s interests. Membership has privileges.

  8. Mayhap introduce her to that Chinese immigrant lady who recently upbraided David Hogg?

  10. An argument can be made to ban gun ownership. A stupid one but one nonetheless.

    No argument can be made for a ban on blocking incoming fire. Unless of course the folks on charge don’t want you blocking incoming fire.

    Anyone trying to ban blocking an attack is a monster who wants you dead.

      • Biden is nothing more than a Manchurian Candidate being controlled from behind the curtain. Even if Trump wins in November the assault on the 2nd amendment will still exist unfettered and just as voracious as ever.

  11. Be very wary of Marxist politicians who want to limit or deny your inalienable rights based on the misdeeds of criminals. That is pure insanity and evil.

  12. https://www.hoplitearmor.com/
    https://www.apexarmorsolutions.com/
    https://stealtharmorsystems.com/
    Generally had great experiences with the above

    https://rmadefense.com/
    Works but about as low as I would want to go.

    No real use case for steel body armor but if you have to have it for whatever reason go with actual armor grade steel (highcom or similar that is rated for 3200+ fps 5.56) and not some garbage grade abrasion resistant (insert gimmick number here)

  13. The hits just keep on coming.
    Can our wonderful .giv ban armadillos riding on you? Seems like if that’s their choice they couldn’t.
    (‘shhhhhh , We wont mention the super glue).
    I make jokes but it looks like real freedom in America is the joke.

    • Just go to the Ammoland website. They have an article with a Rittenhouse Essentials kit on sale.

          • Yet to find a steel plate cheaper than any ceramic that can reliably stop 5.56 m193 out of a 16 inch barrel let alone longer and forget it ever stopping m855a1 let alone anything armor piercing (well maybe 7.62×39 bz api). With that said if weight isn’t an issue it can stop enough 308/30-06 (not so much 270) to make one question if they wouldn’t get shot someplace the plate was not after the first few. Obviously not a fan of steel armor but more because of the marketing gimmicks that make it difficult to discuss useful armor.

        • Exception being militek those actually do perform to spec routinely. May not be the best build quality or design but works for the price.

  15. Breaking: SCOTUS news for CARGILL V. ATF BUMP STOCK BAN CASE.

    The US Supreme Court has issued another decision in a case argued during the February 2024 oral argument session and based on prior practice, it looks like one of the following justices will write the Cargill decision involving that ATF’s bump stock ban: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Barrett.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flGSrttW83M

  19. Democratic Congresswoman Grace Meng apparently wants to make it easier for criminals to shoot you.

    No. She wants to make it easier for a tyrannical gov’t to KILL you.

    From a tactical perspective, Congresswoman Meng’s legislation is a headscratcher. She believes Americans deserve protection from handgun rounds, but not rifle ammunition.

    It’s not a head-scratcher at all. We shouldn’t project logic or caring about citizens upon someone who invokes neither. She does NOT believe Americans deserve protection… well… from anything, especially from the gov’t. She IS concerned about protecting the gov’t from Americans.

    This has NOTHING to do with crime. It has everything to do with hobbling the ability of citizens to rebel against and protect themselves from tyranny in every way possible.

    • 100%

      They want to be able to take you out with their rifles and if you have body armor that means their jackboot goons simply can’t execute you as easily.

  21. So our “betters” want to ban body armor. Would that include them and their security details? It’s not legal firearm owners that they and WE need to worry about. It is about all the armed criminals and adjudicated mental defectives that our so-called “betters” refuse to arrest and incarcerate to prevent their further criminality and societal harm.

  23. The sole reason for this bill is because they want to be able to shoot and kill you easier. If you have access to body armor the police can’t execute you so easily.

    • Same reason they don’t like AP ammo available to civilians and no I do not mean M2ap 30-06 black tip or the 855/855a1 green or brown tip I mean current tech carbide core tungsten types and better. With that said 8mm Mauser AP ammo from WW2 era is remarkably more effective against many plates than all but the most advanced 30 cal.

  24. These twerps are so freaking stupid. Any 5.56 military round versus a .270 or 30.06 deerrifle ar what she should worry about when the sheet hits the fan. I have level IV but know it won’t stop a .50 cal.That would be best used on Liberals

  25. The New York State Legislature put a similar law into affect right after the Tops shooting. It limited purchase of body armor to the usual folks. Along with people employed in an eligible profession such as private security. Looks like Congress is finally catching up. And who says there’s nothing new under the sun.

  26. THe gun grabbers cult are so damned stupid, they have no idea what they are talking about. I am fed up with stupid people, elected by other stupid people, stepping all over my rights.

  27. The proper response to the Buffalo shooter is to investigate the eco-communist ideology that he and a half dozen other mass gun-murderers were inspired by.

    These were all followers of Tarrant, the manifesto-writing perpetrator of the mosque shooting in Christ Church NZ. He explained that whites are the only ones who are limiting their reproduction in order to save the planet.

    Of course it is actually babies who will save the planet, but all eco-communists are eco-morons, and may actually believe their insane anti-humanism. Since other races were not helping to reduce population growth, Tarrant figured that a whole lot of whites need to start mass murdering non-whites in order to save the planet, reducing their population for them, as it were.

    Bombs might kill more people, but Tarrant said he preferred to use guns, and in particular the demonized “assault weapon” (a semi-auto rifle patterned after low-power full-auto-capable military rifles of the mM-16 AK47 variety) because that would help to get these rifles banned, which would inflame political divisions and help to start a race-war, which in Tarrant’s mind would be a great depopulation mechanism.

    The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto re-iterated all of these points. Other shooters in the same vein were the El Paso shooter and the Gilroy shooter (both trying to kill hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, because they refuse to limit reproduction like the good (stupid) white humanity-hating eco-leftists.

    The Highland Park parade shooter (the cross-dressing Robert Crimo), was another eco-communist who was explicitly out to try to get guns banned. Hours before his mass-murder he talked to his father about a recent mass shooting in Copenhagen, and explained his motivation for what he was about to do:

    According to the father, his son said that: “People like that, … [commit mass shootings] to amp up the people that want to ban all guns.”

    You’ve got indoctrinated kids who buy into the leftist eco-lies about capitalism killing the planet and human prosperity killing the planet, so that when their own lives fall apart for whatever reason (hating humanity and prosperity can’t help) and they get suicidal (like Crimo was), they see helping the anti-gun cause by committing mass murder as a way that they can do some good on the way out. It’s a two-fer on the leftist scale of “values”: both advancing gun control and reducing human overpopulation.

    More about our current peril (quite a bit more) if anyone is interested:

    We can be pretty sure that there are leftist online forums where these “benefits” to society and the world of committing murder-suicide in this way are openly discussed. The FBI (domestically) and the CIA (internationally) could keep an eye on these things, and find out who is serious about it, but all that our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies care about these days is trying to rig elections in favor of our now fully communist Democratic Party.

    I would not be surprised if they actually are monitoring eco-communist mass-murder discussions, and even engaging in them, but I would be pretty sure that if they are, they are fomenting these mass murders, rather than trying to interdict them.

    They did that with the Whitmer kidnapping hoax and the J6 insurrection hoax. These were false flag operations orchestrated by Obama intel people, meant to advance election-stealing and election-rigging objectives while framing political opponents for the Obama peoples’ own crimes.

    Gun banning is a top-line Democrat/communist objective, and the Obama communists who run JoeBama’s FBI and CIA (Obama was a paid professional Alinsky communist for his entire pre-electoral career), have always believed that of course they will have to break some eggs to make their totalitarian communist omelet.

    Bill Clinton did the same thing with his long resistance to implementation of the NRA-sponsored Operation Exile. It was obvious that enforcing the federal mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for felons in possession would powerfully deter gun possession by felons and reduce gun crime, which is exactly why Clinton fought it. He knew he needed gun murders to advance his gun control objectives, and gun banning was more important to him than saving lives.

    We don’t think of Bill Clinton as a communist but he was married to the communist Hillary (who was actually mentored by Alinsky himself, the leading American communist of the 20th century), and he let her write the Democrats’ first attempt at socialized medicine (Hillarycare, later to become Obamacare), costing him the 1994 mid-term elections.

    Alinsky remained a small “c” communist because the American Communist Party refused to follow the lead of European capital “C” Communism, where Antonio Gramsi led a switch in Communist strategy from trying to foment class warfare (which working class Europeans were not going along with, since they were prospering under capitalism), to executing what Gramsci’s students called “the long march through the institutions.”

    Alinsky came up with a long march strategy tailored to America’s traumatic racial history and our vulnerability to racial demagoguery: maximize black misery (“rub raw the resentments” and “fan the sores of discontent”), and weaponize that misery to replace America’s values of liberty and majority rule (government of the people, by the people, and for the people), and individual justice (equal protection), with directly polar-opposite communist anti-values.

    Those anti-values as they have emerged in recent decades are DEI (or in chronological order, DIE): 

    “Diversity” means judging people by the color of their skin instead of by their individual character and merit. It’s the anti-MLK. No more individual justice.

    The latest D-development is the Biden DOJ’s lawsuit against Sheetz gas stations for running criminal background checks on employees. That allows job applicants to be judged as individuals. Do they have a criminal record or don’t they? Employers are not allowed to know. They can only try to get clues from skin color. People must be judged by race only.

    “Inclusion” means no one can offend anyone, which means no free speech, because everything offends someone, but they aren’t going to shut down their own speech, so the rule for who gets to decide what is offensive becomes: “which group is most marginalized?”

    The smallest group gets to dictate everyone’s speech. Majority rule gets replaced by rule of the tiniest minority, which is “trans.”

    Trans gets to dictate how everyone else must talk, and this is the actual rule in all Democrat controlled institutions, which is all of academia, all of the public schools, almost all of our print and broadcast media, all of our internet monopolies, all of our major philanthropies, and all of our ESG corporations, and of course the Democratic Party itself, which controls both the Executive branch (thanks to the stolen 2020n election), and Congress (thanks to all the RINO “Republicans”).

    “Equity” means replacing the genuine value that is equality of opportunity with the phony anti-value that is equality of outcomes. In Federalist 10 Madison explained that equality of outcomes means the annihilation of liberty, because liberty will always quickly lead to large and growing inequality of outcomes.

    Liberty means that people can do whatever they want, and according to their different talents and proclivities, they will tend to do very different things, if they have the liberty to do so, leading to very different outcomes. Thus the only way to get rid of inequality is to get rid of liberty.

    We can’t have both, and as the Preamble to the Constitution declares, we choose “to secure the blessings of liberty.” That is what we ratified as a nation, and these DIE communists are out to exactly invert every element of it.

    For that they need us disarmed. They anticipate mass murdering us. Another of Obama’s mentors, ex-Weather Underground head Bill Ayers, who hosted Obama’s first political fundraiser in Chicago and ghostwrote Obama’s “autobiography” Dreams of my Father, said in his terrorist heyday that to secure communist takeover of America the usurping communists would probably have to kill something like an eighth of the population.

    ” ‘The thing the most bone chilling thing Bill Ayers said to me was that after the revolution succeeded and the government was overthrown, they believed they would have to eliminate 25 million Americans who would not conform to the new order,’ said Larry Grathwohl, a former FBI agent.” — “Ayers’ speech interrupted by protesters,” ABC7, January 28, 2009.

    That is what communists do. They have never not committed epic mass murder, and they know that better than anyone. So they are very driven to disarm the people they want to kill: the patriotic law-abiding citizenry who embrace the values of America as founded.

    Born into a world of slavery, America’s founding values of liberty, individual justice, and honest majority rule had within 100 years purged that ancient evil not just from America, but together with England we had purged it from half the world (the Islamic world and the far east excepted).

    This glorious history is what the left pretends is a shameful history that justifies replacing the values that freed the world with the anti-values of communism, the system of universal slavery.

    With their dominant control of so many institutions, including all of our information industries, our now fully communist Democrats have been able to dupe huge numbers of their victims into accepting this blatantly fraudulent narrative. We still have some chance to beat them, but the hour is getting very late.

    They ARE going to steal the next election, just as they stole the last, and anyone who has been paying any attention at all knows it. The question is, can we find a way to keep their steal from succeeding again?

    Can we “win big enough to beat the rig” as Trump puts it? We certainly have to try, but they will just rig it bigger. We have to win by enough to make the rig so obvious that they can’t get away with it.

    (Sorry for the length. Just had to get that out.)

  28. That Tarrarnt guy is a dumbass, to get rid of everybody you kill off the doctors. Less of them then there are of the other guys.

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