the.com/full metal jacket

A bullet in a tuxedo: soft lead dressed up so it stops expanding and starts punching through.

means A bullet with a hard metal shell (usually copper or a copper alloy) wrapped around a soft lead core, designed to hold its shape on impact instead of mushrooming.

from From late-1800s military small-arms design: 'jacket' had long meant an outer covering, and arms-makers borrowed it for the metal sheath encasing a lead bullet — 'full' metal jacket meaning the casing wraps the whole bullet, nose to base, rather than leaving lead exposed at the tip. The design itself emerged alongside smokeless powder and higher-velocity rifles, which made plain lead bullets prone to stripping or deforming in the barrel; cladding them in a tougher metal solved that. The phrase later became widely known to civilians through Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam War film 'Full Metal Jacket,' which borrowed the ammunition term as its title.

invented by
Swiss army captain in 1882, not Kubrick
the point
copper jacket stops bullets mushrooming or melting in guns
geneva rule
militaries require them to avoid expanding hollow-point wounds
kubrick twist
movie's title mocks soldiers as jacketed, hardened humans too
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