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So what about the other sections of the car?

Well, we shot those too.

Here you will see a photo progression of the Buick O' Truth taking a sound beating from an AR-15, beginning with the engine bay.

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Picture #2

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Picture #3buickengine4

Picture #4buickengine5

Picture #5

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Picture #6

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And then the trunk area.buickengine8

Picture #2

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The shots were concentrated around the wheel wells.

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The engine area of the vehicle did pretty well.

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The trunk area, however...

So what is the bottom line of the Buick O' Truth?
1. You do NOT want to be in the passenger compartment of a vehicle when someone opens up on it with a firearm.

As I was at Blackwater this week, my dentist was driving from his home with his wife to go to dinner when their jackass neighbor opened up on their vehicle with a firearm. His wife is dead and he is still in the intensive care unit on a vent at UVA.

If someone starts shooting at you while you are in a vehicle, get the hell out of there NOW. Hit the accelerator and if you have to run the bastard over, do it.

A car provides little in the way of cover, but it DOES give you the power to move fast which makes you harder to hit. Use that to your advantage.

2. If you cannot move, you CAN fight from inside the vehicle. By "fight" I do not mean that you can set up camp and shoot it out with the badguys from inside the vehicle. I mean that you can open fire on the bad guys so they are at least getting some incoming rounds while you try to escape.

3. If your vehicle cannot move, GET AWAY FROM IT ASAP. You have about 8 seconds to get away from the vehicle before your chances of survival are nill. As you can see from the Buick O' Truth, it doesn't take much to punch through the sides of a car with bullets.

A determined adversary with some ammo can turn your "cover" into a death trap in seconds. If your vehicle cannot move, you are better off getting away from the vehicle and going prone to return effective fire than you are holding up behind the vehicle waiting to get shot.

"But...That is leaving my only cover!" I can hear someone object.

Firstly, the Buick O' Truth isn't cover. It is a gigantic bullet magnet, and if you are hiding behind it you are more likely to end up shot than you are to use it effectively for cover. Real life engagements have shown that bad guys tend to focus on and shoot the hell out of the vehicle, and that if the good guys can get away from the vehicle and get prone that they are able to return fire effectively while the bad guys remain fixated on the vehicle.

4. If you must shoot into the passenger compartment of a vehicle, it is almost impossible to predict what will happen to the bullet or the people inside that passenger compartment.

When I said that there were bullet jackets and fragments everywhere, I meant it. Your bullet could penetrate through two people and keep going out the trunk, or it could be so damaged by entering the vehicle that it doesn't have the energy to break the skin of the person you are trying to stop, and the difference between those two outcomes can be 1/4 of an inch.

5. Shooting stuff is fun.

6. Shooting stuff isn't as much fun when you start to picture yourself inside a vehicle that you have just turned into swiss cheese. It takes some of the fun out of things to realize just how exposed you are. In fact, it is darn scary to see the passenger compartment shredded with chunks of bullet lying all over the place.