flynbenny wrote:The idea is that at a distance of around 12-15 feet or less (i.e. distances in a small apartment such as mine) the shot will strike as a single mass. The pattern at that range will be 6 in or less. The reason for using the smaller shot is that should the shooter miss, the pellets will be stopped or slowed to less than lethal velocity, so that persons in another room or apartment are not harmed. My birdshot round for home defense is 1 7/8 oz. of no. 5 birdshot loaded max pressure, in 3 inch high brass. It's a heavy field load from Federal.C-dub wrote:I'm probably wrong, but the bird shot might be more for it's psychological effect and ability to cause pain than it's ability to kill. Anyone?sar wrote:I've operated on more folks shot with shotguns than I care to think about. Those of you who have birdshot in their guns are strongly overestimating the effectiveness. The penetration is miserable and if the recipient is heavily clothed, may be negligible. This is not speculation, but observation.
Aside from some of accounts here and on the 'BoT', I personally don't know of anyone surviving a chest or head shot from a heavy 12 ga load under 25 feet, nearly 2 oz of lead hitting at 1200 fps is going to leave a mark.
The ballistic reality is that as soon as the shot begins to spread out at about 1 yard from the muzzle, the shot doesn't strike as a single semisolid mass, which a "6 inch pattern" clearly is not. It consists of a bunch of very tiny individual pellets carrying far less energy than a BB and insufficient to achieve reliable deep penetration. The result is a shallow, ugly looking wound with little or no damage to vital organs and a very angry shootee.
Selecting your ammunition for missed shots seems like a reversal of priorities to me. Additional training and practice with proven defensive ammunition would be a much better way to go.
Once again I'll suggest a quick way to evaluate a prospective ammunition choice: Do the police, who do this every day under the widest possible variety of circumstances and spend a lot of money and effort on testing, use what you're considering? If yes, then it may be suitable for your use under conditions similar to when they use it to achieve the results they use it for. If no, then you use something different that's been around for a while at your peril, because you can be nearly 100% certain that the professional users have already looked at and rejected it because it doesn't do the job right.
