Has Spirit gotten defensive? Yes, but he was asking a simple question which there are answers too. How about we just focus on the answers to the questions and ignore the answers to the question we hoped he would ask? Give him the real deal answer and let him be an adult, take the information, and draw his own conclusions.
I get annoyed when answers are “don’t think, just do x because I said so”
Is it pratical to make the interior walls of your pre-existing house bullet proof? I don’t think so, but if it helps you sleep at night, there are things that can be done to improve the odds of stopping a bullet. I don’t know them all, but this is one. I am a big fan of concrete board. It is dense and lasts forever, and I have used it inside the house as I have remodeled. Texture it as you would sheetrock and no one is the wiser. Plywood, other than making you live like a nut, is also flamible and a bad idea for this reason alone. I didn’t use hardi board to stop bullets but to stop termites and you don’t have the brittling with age you get with regular sheetrock.
It is only about 4X sheetrock so won’t break the bank, and you cut it with regular carbide tipped saw blades. Just keep using the same one on the hardi board since it won’t be any good for wood anymore. When cutting around outlets and the like I draw the box that needs to be cut, drill the corners with a normal drill bit, and then use a jig saw metal cutting jig saw blades or really cheep wood cuting blades. Hardi board wears them out fast.
That will give 1” of concrete for every set of interior walls. I have no idea how many inches you need to stop a 9mm round but probably more than a couple inches. If you are really into this, nothing keeps you from stacking two sheets on top of each other for thickness.
Assuming you have the foundation for it (I live in a slab house so didn’t even think of the issue till another ilbob brought it up) nothing keeps you from filling the empty spaces between the studs with something. Brick is easy for the bottom and some people use small pebbles top to bottom.
If you did this, I would not assume the wall is bullet proof (at a minimum you have a 8.5% chance of hitting a stud, which a normal 9mm is going to zip through) but between this and the hardi board it should improve your odds substantially and is not expensive, even less so if you were going to re-sheetrock anyway.
If you want to go that one step extra, instead of texturing the surface of the hardi board, tile it instead with a tough ceramic tile. You can do this in bathrooms and it won’t even look odd there.
Again, I didn’t do what I did to make my house bullet proof, I was remodeling anyway. But all things being equal, why not take the road that might give a bit of an edge? People here go to extreem lengths to defend against the absolute and quite improbable worst (and attack others for not doing so!), so what exactly makes Spirit’s underlying (I’m not touching the plywood issue – that is nuts
) question crazy?