Can fat save you from a bullet?

This is something that has already been simulated, thanks to a ballistic gelatin with a consistency and density similar to that of human fat.

A 9 mm bullet can penetrate such a substance for about 72 cm. This is therefore the thickness required for body fat to block small-caliber bullets.

The problem is that this is a ridiculously large thickness. The fat layer of the largest animal that ever lived, the blue whale, barely reaches 50 cm.

If a whale can’t reach that thickness, imagine a human being.

It can be estimated that a person weighing 150 kilograms has, at the waist, a layer of fat that would be enough to protect from a 9-millimeter bullet. But fat distribution over the body isn’t uniform, and a hit a little higher or lower would still get them killed.

To have an even layer of 30 centimeters of fat over the entire body (not enough to resist a bullet, just to cushion the impact) one would have to weigh 600 kilograms.

It is also true that depending on the trajectory of the bullet and the individual’s fat distribution, this could become possible.

This is the case of a woman, Samantha Lynn Frazier, who got shot in the love handles by a stray bullet and managed to survive it.