Originally Posted by copwriter
Depends on the manufacturer. Some trauma plates are made of ceramic material, rather than metal.
For those of you that don't know what we're talking about: soft body armor vests usually come with a metal or ceramic plate in a pocket more or less over the sternum. The plate is removable. The idea isn't necessarily to give the vest more resistance to bullets, but rather to spread the impact of a bullet over a larger area. If one gets shot in the sternum without a trauma plate, the impact can break the bone and incapacitate the wearer. It's not like it won't hurt if you get shot on the trauma plate, but you can still return fire.
I know several people that wear soft body armor, all the time (and at least one of them has never been a cop). I'm not precisely sure why. Maybe they have lots of enemies. The vests aren't very comfortable. After wearing one for 10-12 hours, I understood why corsets went out of style.
Completely incorrect.
A "trauma shield" is SOFT material sitting under the kevlar layers of, for example, the IIIA "interceptor" body armour worn by US service personnel.
The kevlar will stop pretty much anything coming out of a shotgun, pistol, sub-machine gun, etc as well as fragments from bombs/ grenades/ mortar rounds. etc. The Kevlar physically entraps the projectile, but does not stop the kinetic energy, which can cause "blunt trauma" injuries to the vest wearer.
The SOFT trauma shield is designed to absorb/ spread that kinetic energy, and thus prevent a stopped bullet bursting your liver or causing your intestines to bleed out.
The HARD PLATES in modern body armour provide increased protection from high-velocity projectiles (typically rifle and machine gun rounds). They do diddly-squat to stop trauma, and wearing a hard plate without a trauma shield can lead to a burst liver or bleeding intestines....
Eg: The US-issue "interceptor" vest won't stop a round from an AK-47 without the plates (well, it might at long range, if you're REALLY lucky), but with the hard-armour plates will allow you to take half a dozen rounds from an AK-47 in the chest at close range, then get back on your feet and shoot the stunned mullet who shot you.
The so-called "cermic" plates in the interceptor vest are actually made of boron-carbide, with a spectrashield backing. They WILL activate most metal detectors.
A soft kevlar vest, complete with SOFT trauma shield, will not.