Was the Aurora Shooter Really Wearing Body Armor?

Via Ol' Remus

From the first reporting of the incident up through the present, we've heard that the person who attacked the Dark Knight Rises audience in Colorado last week was wearing "body armor". A sampling:

* USA Today: He was dressed head-to-toe in black bullet-proof gear, including helmet, vest, leggings and a groin and throat protector.

* HuffPo: [Aurora Police Chief Dan] Oates confirmed that the suspected shooter was ***, who entered the theater during a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" dressed in all black and with heavy body armor.

* And this breathless piece in Amateur Webzine Slate: Armored and Dangerous, The scariest innovation in the Aurora mass shooting isn’t guns or ammo. It’s SWAT gear.

But is this true?

Here's a pdf of a receipt for some of the equipment the shooter purchased. One of the items is called the "Blackhawk Urban Assault Vest". Here's what it looks like:

That's not a bulletproof vest. A clue can be found in the big green open spot in the middle of it. Some would call that "center mass".

Now it's possible the shooter wore that vest over a bulletproof vest, but following the trail of the reporting, it seems like there's also a decent probability that an initial erroneous report from the scene that either repeated eyewitness accounts of body armor or mistook the vest above to be bulletproof morphed into the account of the fully armored killing machine that the press is running with now. After all, they do have a history of being not even wrong where gun-related reporting is concerned. It will be interesting to see if the "facts" as we now know them change as more details are released.

Why is this important?

More @ Ace of Spades