One of these for home defense?

[C-dub]

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.

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?

[Excaliber]

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.

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?

I think sar is trying to communicate the fact that birdshot fired from more than just a few feet away does not possess the penetration, wound channel, and energy delivery characteristics necessary to end a threat without voluntary compliance by the aggressor. Any projectile or group of projectiles that doesn't do that doesn't meet the most basic requirement for defensive use in a life threatening encounter.

[Dan20703]

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.

Use buckshot. Birdshot is for little birds.

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[Chemist45]

You cannot argue with the Box of Truth.

I'm switching to buckshot.

[wheelgun1958]

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.

It may not penetrate heavy clothing, but I'm sure he'll penetrate his shorts!

[Excaliber]

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.

It may not penetrate heavy clothing, but I'm sure he'll penetrate his shorts!

Perhaps. And then he'll likely get really mad and actively and physically express his displeasure to the serious detriment of the birdshot firing defender, who will also likely soil his shorts when he realizes his attacker wasn't overly impressed by a loud noise and superficial wound, and isn't behaving like he assumed a bad guy would.

[Kevinf2349]

My home shotty usually has 1 bird, 2 buck and 2 slugs in it, loaded to come out in that order.

If I can get rid of the vermin with bird shot, great, if not then up a level to 00 and then 2 slugs in case they are zombies.

Having read this thread I think the only thing I would change may be the bird and put something a little heaver in there.

[dicion]

Birdshot is for birds. Minimum acceptable Home Defense is 00 Buck.

I wouldn't use slugs, mainly because they will penetrate more than 00 buck, also, you'll get a larger pattern, and a higher chance of a hit IMO with buck.
A slug is <1". If you miss, you miss. A pattern of buckshot, depending on your distance to the BG, your choke (Full recommended), the brand, and if your barrel is rifled (rifled barrels spread the shot quicker), will be anywhere from 1" to 6" at typical HD scenario distances. Gives you a little more chance to hit the BG with at least some, if not all, of it.

All of this, of course is IMO.

[jgp]

Marlin 1894 .44 Mag with 16" barrel. Loaded with .44 Spl HP ammo.

This reminds me of something I heard the other day. HP defensive bullets engineered to expand and penetrate well at handgun velocities may just blow apart and do weird (undesirable) things when accelerated to rifle speeds. The suggestion was to stick with wadcutters or flat-nosed bullets in the pistol caliber carbines. Has anyone had an experience like that?

[flynbenny]

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.

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?

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.

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.

[Excaliber]

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.

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?

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.

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.

[Skiprr]

Having been away from the Forum for several months, I realize how much I miss some folk's posts. Excaliber is one.

My two cents (and only MHO) on a couple of defensive shotgun points:

Choked barrels in anything tighter than police-cylinder are not a good idea. I'd stay with cylinder bore or police-cylinder. Tighter chokes are really intended for bird-shot only. Choking--logically--actually stretches many of the lead pellets as they come out of the barrel: if you take malleable lead pellets and smoosh 'em together at a constriction point under high pressure and a bit of heat, they're going to change shape. When you want a wide downrange spread to influence a duck in flight, that isn't a bad thing.

But what you want in a defensive shotgun is a consistent, uniform pattern density. When you change the shape of the pellets from round to ovoid, you get flyers, misshapen pellets that spin end over end and fly outside the mass of the main pellets. Not a good in a defensive weapon: you don't want most of the pellets to hit the bad guy, but a few fly off out of pattern and pop aunt Ellen and uncle Frank.

Similarly, while slugs can be fired through a choked barrel, accuracy at distance will suffer because, again, the constricted barrel will reshape the slug to at least some degree.

I also don't like rifled shotgun barrels. They can make your use of slugs more accurate, but it's far from a good idea for shot. What happens with shot in a rifled barrel is that, as the shot travels down the barrel and comes in contact with the lands and grooves, a spin is imparted both to individual pellets and to the mass of pellets as a hole. What you'll find if you pattern 00-buck out of a rifled barrel at 8, 15, and 25 yards is that the cluster of pellets expands more quickly than out of a smooth cylinder bore or police-cylinder. Moreover, the pellets are fanning out in what amounts to an expanding circle, not as a basically random mass of lead.

This is not a good thing. First, with an expanding circle of buckshot, as the distance to the target increases, the less likely you are hit what you aimed at. If you aim COM at, say, 20 yards, that expanding circle may miss the bad guy's chest, head, and shoulders completely, and the lower part of the circle may put a few pellets into his thighs. Second, those pellets that miss still go somewhere. Collateral damage downrange of the intended target is very likely.

What you really want is a predictable mass of buckshot out of smooth bore, with little or no choke, that expands--relatively slowly--in a consistent spread. A general formula is that 00-buck out of an 18"-20" cylinder bore will spread about two centimeters for every meter downrange, or about .7 inches per yard...give or take. So at 10 yards you still have a good, combat-sized spread of about 7 inches. That's controllable and effective.

You wanna hit what you aim at, not have pellets flying all over the place to locations you didn't aim.

Last up, I don't think it's a good idea to charge the tube with different types of rounds. Murphy's law. If the first round is birdshot, real life will give you a situation where you only have time for one shot and you need that first round to be the stopper. Similarly, if you load a few rounds of shot and then some slugs, real life will end up presenting you with a situation where you've fired your buckshot (or forgotten your round count!) but the use of slugs and the much greater penetration they afford would be risky to non-combatants.

I think the best solution is to keep one, tested load in the gun (I keep 00-buck, and wouldn't go smaller than number 1, even in an apartment), and have a few rifled slugs on side-saddle. Learning to perform an ammunition swap (essentially the same thing as a speed-load except you're first removing the chambered round and tube-fed round, if they're there) is pretty easy to do, but does require practice...just like anything else. Then if you ever find you need the penetration or greater effective distance of a slug, you open the chamber and manually load a slug.

[MoJo]

Bird shot is for the birds, any thing smaller than 00 buck is placing your life and the life of your loved ones in danger. #4 Buck is marginal at best. People obsess about over penetration a .223 or 00 buck is less likely to over penetrate than a .38 special RNL. Remember if they are in your home uninvited they aren't there to play peanuckle. Racking a shotgun is not liable to cause a BG to fall into the fetal position and soil his pants. Be prepared to USE that gun, if you can't call 911 and pray.

[Zee]

Swinging the business end of a big-A rifle towards someone is one thing but using it indoors is something else. I'd be afraid of blowing through walls and doing unwanted damage. I lean towards a handgun for moving around easily or a shotgun for limited distance.

[CDH]

FYI, especially for the 00 buck or nothing guys:

Winchester (for example) #3 buck in 20 gauge
1200 fps
.24" nominal round ball
20 pellets

Roughly comparable to 20 rounds of 22LR all at once.

I'd put that well above marginal any day.

12 gauge #4 buck
1210 fps
.23" nominal
41 pellets

I'd trust it with my life. YMMV of course...but I have a 6 and 4 year old in the house too and while you may not care, I do.