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An ASUS TUF owner says their gaming monitor may have saved their life after a stray bullet ripped through the wall of their home last week. In a post shared to r/ASUS on November 1, u/antisocialnae says they were playing some late-night “Call of Duty” when they heard loud bangs outside. One of them sounded close enough that the user dropped to the floor and called 911.
The operator asked them to check the wall, and that’s when they found a single hole right behind their monitors. The bullet had hit the main one, an ASUS TUF VG258QM, and did not come out the other side. The owner picked it up for $280 five years ago, back when they put together their very first gaming setup. The post was aptly titled, “Best $280 I ever spent.”
ASUS has already seen it, too. A member of the company’s marketing team replied to the post saying ASUS would reach out “to see what we can do to honor its sacrifice.” There’s no word yet on whether that means a new monitor, but the owner doesn’t seem too worried about it. They still have two other ASUS monitors to play on and say they were wanting to upgrade anyways. A bullet hole is about as clear of a sign it’s time to replace your computer monitor as you can get.
We’ve seen other tech do similarly
The VG258QM isn’t marketed as a bulletproof monitor. Its service manual does list a piece of “shielding” among the parts inside, though that’s to protect from radio and electromagnetic frequencies. ASUS hasn’t said which of the internal parts the bullet may have run into, and we don’t know if anyone has opened the monitor up to find out. It’s most likely that the wall helped stop much of the bullet’s force before it then hit the monitor, which did the rest of the work before it caused any more harm.
Something similar happened back in 2019. At least five shots were fired into Eric Gan’s apartment in Fresno, California, and one of them struck the back of his MSI Optix G27C2 after coming through the wall. Gan wasn’t at his desk at the time and the monitor still worked afterward, with only a small divot on the back. MSI later said a steel plate inside the monitor is what stopped the bullet and deflected it. That steel plate was also designed to cut down on electromagnetic interference. The wall had likely absorbed a lot of the bullet’s energy before it got to the MSI monitor, too.
In 2022, an 18-year-old gamer in Torrance, California said a stray bullet broke through their bedroom window, hit the wall and then struck their Razer Kraken headset while it was on their head. Razer reached out to them afterward about getting them a new headset. Later that year, a video of a soldier pulling a wrecked iPhone 13 Pro out of his vest showed how an iPhone might have saved a Ukrainian soldier’s life by stopping a bullet.
