I understand that shooting high powered rifles is a lot of fun, so recreation makes sense with respect to weaponry, but I'm legitimately confused about why a civilian would ever want to own body armor. I can't imagine it's terribly comfortable to wear, and it doesn't seem very fun to me.
Call it a failure of imagination, but to me it seems exceedingly unwise for a law abiding civilian to be entering a situation where body armor would be helpful (and I say this as a firearm owner).
Civilian weapons R&D, mining where explosives are being used, private security work, civilian firearm instruction, protection for targetted individuals e.g. Malcom X / MLK, Journalists in conflict zones (you saw them warn in DC during the protests as well)
Albiet the U.S. has and always will be a special case due to high firearm ownership and rather open ownership of those sorts of things.