If you have ever set up a steel gong target at the range, there is a good chance you have seen the classic version of the job: a plate hanging off a wooden frame or a pipe stand on a couple of feet of hardware store chain. It is the setup most people default to, because chain feels like the obvious choice. It is metal, the target is metal, and metal seems like what you want holding a plate that is about to get shot all day.
We started out the same way. Then we watched enough chain setups fail, some of them in ways that were genuinely dangerous, that we redesigned our entire hanging system around Kevlar instead. This article walks through exactly why, because the reasons are not obvious until you understand what actually happens to your hanging hardware over the course of a shooting session.
Your Hanging Hardware Gets Shot. Plan for It.
Here is the fact that the whole chain versus strap question turns on: whatever is holding your gong up is going to take bullets. Not might. Will.
Every shooter pulls a shot high eventually. Every new shooter you bring to the range is going to spray a few rounds around the plate while they find their feet. Even good shooters running fast drills will clip the top edge of the target, and everything above that edge is your hanging system. Over the life of a steel target, the straps or chains holding it are going to absorb stray hits, edge splatter, and fragments from every single round that connects with the plate below them.
So the real question is not which material looks tougher on day one. It is which material fails safely when the inevitable happens.
What Happens When a Bullet Hits a Chain
A chain link is a small, hard, rigid steel target of its own. When a bullet strikes one, a few things can happen, and none of them are good.
The most dramatic outcome is that the link shatters or shears. Hardware store chain is not AR500. It is mild steel or, at best, a medium carbon steel, and a rifle round will cut a link outright. When that happens, the pieces of the link become secondary projectiles, sharp fragments of steel flying in directions nobody can predict. At the same instant, your gong, which can weigh twenty five pounds or more, drops. Sometimes it just falls. Sometimes it swings down on the remaining chain and slams into the stand.
The less dramatic outcome is worse in some ways, because you do not see it. A bullet or fragment strikes a link and damages it without breaking it. The link deforms, cracks internally, or work hardens at the impact point. The chain still looks like a chain. It still holds the plate. And then three sessions later it lets go under nothing more than the normal swing of the target, because the failure started weeks earlier where you could not see it.
That is the fundamental problem with chain as a hanging medium: chain gives you no warning. A chain is a series of small rigid parts, any one of which can be compromised invisibly, and the whole system is only as strong as the one link you did not know was cracked.
What Happens When a Bullet Hits a Kevlar Strap
Kevlar behaves completely differently under fire, and the difference comes down to how the material is built. A Kevlar strap is not one rigid part. It is thousands of woven aramid fibers, the same family of material used in ballistic vests, sharing the load together.
When a bullet passes through a Kevlar strap, it does exactly that: it passes through. It cuts the fibers in its path and leaves a hole. There is no shattering, no fragmentation, no secondary projectiles coming off the hanging system. The fibers around the hole keep carrying the load, and in almost every case the strap keeps holding the target for the rest of the session. We have had customers send us photos of straps with holes clean through them still hanging a plate square and true.
Just as important is what happens afterward. A damaged Kevlar strap shows you its damage. Fraying, thinning, cut fibers, a visible hole: the wear is on the surface where a thirty second inspection catches it. Where a chain hides a cracked link inside itself, a strap wears its condition openly. You retire a strap because you looked at it and decided to, not because it failed and told you that way.
The Strength Question, Answered Honestly
The first reaction most people have to fabric straps is to assume they must be the weak option. It is worth putting numbers on why that instinct is wrong.
Kevlar has a higher tensile strength than steel by weight, roughly five times higher, which is why it shows up in body armor, aircraft, and rigging. A woven strap sized for a steel target is holding a static load of twenty to forty pounds, plus the shock loads of bullet impacts. That is nowhere near the working limit of the material. The strap is not the weak point in a properly built hanging system, and it never will be within the life of the fibers.
Heat is the other place Kevlar quietly outperforms. Aramid fiber does not melt, and it starts to degrade only at temperatures far beyond anything a sunny day at the range produces. Nylon and polyester straps, the cheap webbing you find on ratchet straps, do not belong anywhere near a gong for exactly this reason. If you are going to hang steel on fabric, it needs to be the right fabric.
Chains Also Make Your Target Shoot Worse
Safety is the reason to switch, but it is not the only thing you gain. Chain hangs interact badly with the thing a gong is actually for.
A gong rings and swings when you hit it. That movement is the feedback loop that makes steel worth shooting. On chain, every impact makes the links jump and reseat, which does two things over a session. First, it adds a metallic clatter that muddies the clean ring of the plate. Second, and more meaningfully, the chain creeps. Links twist and settle differently after every string, and the hang angle of your target drifts with them.
That drift matters more than it sounds like it should. A steel gong should hang with a slight forward lean, three to five degrees, so that splatter is directed down at the ground instead of back toward the firing line. We cover the geometry in our safe shooting distances guide, but the short version is that your hang angle is a safety setting. Chain lets that setting wander over the course of a range day. A fixed length Kevlar strap holds the target at the same angle on the last string as it did on the first, because there is nothing in the system to twist, jump, or reseat.
The Inspection Routine That Makes Straps Nearly Foolproof
The honest tradeoff with Kevlar is that it is a wear item. Straps take hits, hits cut fibers, and eventually a strap needs to be replaced. We think that is a feature, not a flaw, because the wear is visible and the replacement is cheap. But it does mean you should build a habit, and the habit takes less than a minute.
Before each session, run each strap through your fingers and look at both faces. You are checking for three things: fraying or fuzzing beyond normal surface wear, any hole or deep cut, and thinning where the strap bears on the grommet or hook. Check the steel grommets and S-hooks while you are there, since hardware wears too. If a strap has taken a direct hit or has visibly lost width anywhere along its length, swap it. A replacement set of Kevlar straps costs less than a couple of boxes of ammunition, which is exactly what a consumable safety item should cost.
Compare that to the equivalent chain inspection, which would require examining every face of every link for hairline cracks that may not be visible at all, and the practical difference is stark. One inspection is a glance and a touch. The other is impossible to do with confidence.
Why We Build Every System Around Straps
Everything we make at Guns Gong Crazy hangs on DuPont Kevlar straps with steel grommets, from the complete AR500 Target System down to the hanging kits and replacement parts. That is not a styling choice. It is the direct result of watching how hanging systems actually fail in the field and designing around the failure mode instead of pretending it will not happen.
A steel target system should assume it will be shot everywhere, not just in the middle of the plate. It should fail gradually and visibly, never suddenly and invisibly. And it should hold its geometry so the safety margins you set up at the start of the day are still there at the end of it. Straps do all three. Chains do none of them.
If you are running a gong on chain right now, we are not going to tell you it will fail tomorrow. We will tell you that when it fails, you will not have seen it coming, because that is how chain fails. Swap it for Kevlar, put the thirty second inspection in your routine, and take that particular surprise off the list of things that can happen at your range.
Shoot straight, shoot safe, and hear that ring.