flashlight

Sure seems like some solid copaganda

How much rigor do you expect?

If you don't mind an absence of rigor, my family shoots out back of my uncle's farm, and has for longer than I've been alive (and I'm so old, I offered King Tut a cold drink once). We've used all kinds of dumb shit as targets, including some maglites back in the day.

They can either stop or vastly reduce any damage from handguns, including 45, 357, and 44. 9mil is kinda meh at penetrating anything metal, even with ball ammo.

Rifle rounds, we didn't tend to have anything much punchier than 308, but that stuff went through at least the front half of aluminum like that. Hard to know if it would have done more, since flashlights standing on a board don't exactly have the same mass behind it to keep it from just being knocked over.

I wanna say 7.62×54 went through the same thickness of steel, but it might have only been partially, we're all older now, so it's been a while since we shot stuff just to see if it could take a bullet. It's more about hanging out and practicing nowadays.

I know 30-30 went through a similar thickness steel slab, and I wanna say someone punched through clean with 273.

Tbh though, any hunting round should be able to get through that thickness of metal, afaicr.

I can believe that a handgun round fired sloppy could easily be stopped by a maglite. If someone did have video, I would be more surprised if it went deep enough to even get all the way through the casing of the light on of side.

The curvature should help some anyway.

Again, that's all low rigor shooting for fun, not serious testing with controls in place and careful measurements, so take it with a grain of salt (or powder, if you prefer)

I've got reliable knowledge of handguns, optics, and full magazines all eating incoming bullets. It doesn't seem absurd that a flashlight on a belt or vest pouch to eat a bullet especially considering the random hodgepodge of low powered rounds (.22lr, .25, .32, .380 as examples) that seem popular in crime. I'd totally put rifles or even 9mm out of mind, as various low power pistol rounds (somewhere in the ballpark of 200j of energy) would be more likely to be stopped, and that's what I'd test if doing backyard science. I don't have a specific instance of a flashlight stopping a round on hand, but it's a metal object claimed to be blocking a potentially low energy incoming round, seems plausible.

Light sabers are the best for that. They do sometimes get confused with flashlights.

Don't get your info from idiots on YouTube. Or idiots on TikTok. Or whatever is next.