As a long arm, it's best used as a barricade weapon: the gun you use when you're in your safe room or otherwise barricaded in a safe area. You have defined areas of fire, and you're in an ensconced position where you likely have some small advanced warning (like the door being broken in) of the need to shoot.
This is a very different scenario than needing to move through your house to retrieve family members, for instance. In the barricaded position you don't need to move around corners nor risk the gun being levered out of your hands by a waiting thug. The long gun is best thought of as artillery: weapons that you use from a fixed position, without the need for rapid movement.
(Yes, I know that you can train to move through structures with the long gun in a special ready position just like the Special Forces do; I've been through those kinds of classes. Guess what? It's still not easy to do under the best of conditions, and severely limits your range of motion and interaction with your environment — doors, anyone?)
... While the shotgun is certainly a powerful tool, it's important to acknowledge that it's not the only one which drops bad guys. There are other choices which are sufficiently powerful to cause an intruder to rapidly cease activity but are significantly easier to handle.
One major issue I have with the shotgun is that, in the configurations most recommended by the training community, they're unwieldily. Even my lightweight 20-gauge with a loaded extended magazine tube is heavier, with a much greater forward weight bias, than most of my rifles.
The pump versions require a long arm reach to get a good grasp on the fore-end, and even the autoloaders require a good reach to get past the long receiver. Once there, the extended arm tires relatively quickly holding up the weight of the ammunition in the tube. A regular (short) magazine tube reduces the weight at the muzzle, but the resulting gun is still heavier than most modern rifles (and even than a lot of distinctly non-modern examples!)
Now you're probably thinking that in an ensconced position none of this really matters, because you'll likely have something on which you can rest that shotgun until you need it. That may be true, but it's also conceivable that you'll need to hold that gun on target as you order the bad guy to leave or face the consequences. The heavier the gun, and the further out from your body the gun's center of gravity is, the harder it is to do for any length of time.
Of course the shotgun, when loaded with proper defensive ammunition, recoils a bit. I'm sure that some of the people reading this will puff out their chests and declare that they have "no problem!" with the recoil and the resulting slow down in followup shots. Good for you! Now what about the other people in your house? How able are they to operate this heavy, hard-kicking arm?My go-to for a strange noise, or whatever, has always been a handgun because I can easily grab it and its not as awkward to maneuver with it in the confines of my house. Nevertheless, I have practiced moving around with a carbine and a shotgun (I used to have a Winchester 1300 Defender with an 18 inch barrel). For me, the shotgun just seemed to come more naturally to the shoulder than a carbine, and the difference in length between the 18 inch barrel shotgun and a 16 inch barrel carbine was not enough for me to favor one over the other; and at 6 1/2 pounds for the shotgun, weight favors the shotgun even if fully loaded.
The real issue will probably be if you feel comfortable leaving the shotgun loaded, because it will not be quick or easy to load the shells in a hurry. At least with a carbine, you can leave the weapon unloaded, and slip a magazine into it when necessary. I never felt comfortable with keeping the shotgun loaded--I was afraid of setting the spring in the tube magazine, and the fact that it cannot be quickly and easily unloaded--i.e., you have to cycle each round through the action.
Years ago, I read an article that discussed the noise created by a firearm going off in an enclosed space, such as a home. The author was of the opinion that anything larger than .380 ACP was too loud - the pain to the shooter's ears would be too much to tolerate firing a second shot. So, larger calibers like larger handgun rounds such as .357, 12 or 20 gauge shotguns, or even the diminutive .223 rifle round would be very painful to shoot inside a house.
ReplyDeleteIf you have ever done any shooting at an indoor range, even with good ear protection, you know the range is a very loud environment. Firing .223 at an indoor range is almost painful, even with good hearing protection. Imagine firing your firearm at an indoor range without hearing protection.
Indoor shooting is one thing Hollywood gets wildly wrong. They will portray an indoor shooting incident, and afterward everybody talks normally with no complaints about ringing ears. The only exception to this I have seen was in an early episode of Walking Dead where Rick Grimes takes refuge inside a military tank and has to shoot a "walker" (zombie) that comes to life inside the tank. That one shooting was portrayed as very painful to Rick from the noise in the enclosed space.
So, I would suggest keeping in mind the acoustic characteristics of your chosen home defense weapon.