Slingshot Channel: Reuploaded

The video which caused the Mail on Sunday to (somewhat foolishly and with gross misrepresentation) attack the Slingshot Channel, has been lightly re-edited on the advice of You Tube officials and re-uploaded. See this link for this blog's original article on that subject.

The main body of the video hasn't been changed, however, and it is clear from watching it, that it was always intended to be a consumer test of a "stab vest" that was being sold via Amazon to the general public, and that actual police stab vests are probably an order of magnitude tougher. It is also obvious that the aluminium plates which are the vest's main form of protection, are not hardened in any way. The vest is priced at around e70 and very cheaply made.

It was an outright and deliberate lie that "it was the same type of vest that PC Palmer wore when he was murdered." It is also the case that Adrian Elms made no attempt to penetrate the vest that PC Palmer wore: he stabbed PC Palmer in places where the vest offered no protection in the first place. It is further worth noting that a lot of bladed weapon murders have been carried out with a stab to the groin to sever the femoral artery (one such was the murder of someone the blog author knew) and almost no police or civilian body armour in widespread use protects against that.

About the only body armour that does protect the femoral artery to some extent is the sort that the late Princess Diana wore in the famous "minefield" photographs taken in Angola. It has a separate plate hanging down to protect the groin area. (From landmine shrapnel in this instance, but the hardened plate would deflect a blade.)

Picture Credit: Reuters

This kind of protection is essential where anti-personnel mines are concerned, because many of them are designed to direct shrapnel at the groin area precisely in order to attack the femoral artery, but there's very little point in "stab-proof" armour that doesn't protect against the sort of wound that killed, for example: Stephen Lawrence, Frank Cox and Damilola Taylor. (In both the Cox and Taylor cases, defendants were able to successfully argue that the directly fatal wound was "accidental", something which simply isn't believed by either victim's families. Vocational criminals, even teenage ones, generally do know to stab for the femoral artery in order to kill. It was a move well known to 18th century duelists.)