Hard Body Armor
Body Armor is of two categories namely the hard body armor and soft body armor.
Hard Body Armor, as the name suggests is made out of thick metal or ceramic plates, with functionally being quite similar to the iron suits worn by much feared medieval knights. This category of Body Armor is hard enough to deflect a bullet shot or any other weapon. The simple reason being that the Body Armor plates push out itself on the bullet with equal force with which the bullet tries to push in, resulting that the bullet is not able to penetrate the armor plate.
Without doubt Hard Body Armor provides more protection than its counter part the Soft Body Armor, but indeed it is quite heavy and much more cumbersome. Sometimes the Police officers and the military personnel may be asked to wear this sort of protection when the degree of risk of attack is very high, but generally it is not preferred any more for everyday use. For day to day use they normally wear Soft Body Armor, which provided flexible protection as if you were to wear an ordinary shirt or jacket.
Normally Body Armor plates are made of ceramic. Now you may ask that why would any kind body armor use ceramic plates when our experience in daily life shows that tiles made of ceramic used in bathrooms are extremely brittle and fragile? The answer is that the ceramic used in Body Armor plates is completely another material and is not way anywhere near to the bathroom ceramic tiles except that both are called ceramic. The Body Armor plates use ceramic called alumina which is the material of which Sapphire is made of and every one is well aware of the hardness of Sapphire. Some Body Armor even use Polyethylene plates which are much thicker but lighter though the degree of protection is somewhat lower than that of ceramic.
Heavier Body Armor is now seen as impediment and not as a good protector.