How to Reload a Defensive Shotgun

even though most defensive shotguns have a relatively low ammo capacity it's almost unheard of for an armed citizen to empty a shotgun before stopping a home invasion that said it's always possible that we might need more ammo than what's already in the shotgun in order to protect our home and our family when we're practicing at the range we're going to need to load and reload the shotgun anyway so we might as well practice a reloading technique that would be viable under fighting conditions there are literally dozens of different techniques for reloading a shotgun but in a home defense context we're probably not going to be able to rely on any kind of pouches or a chest rig or anything that we would use in a competition we're going to be limited to the ammo that is on the gun and typically that means a stock mounted shell carrier or a sidesaddle like this one the side saddles are more popular and that's what I use so today I'm going to demonstrate two different reloading techniques with the side saddle I'll be using the Remington 870 but these reloads should work with any modern pump-action shotgun and they can easily be adapted for most semi automatics as well these aren't necessarily the quickest reloading techniques but they are pretty reliable and they require as little conscious thought and manual dexterity as possible shotgun ammo is big and clumsy to deal with there's lots of ways to mess up these reloads and fumble this ammo so I like to use simple techniques whenever possible when we're training with shotguns we don't want to wait until the gun is empty to think about managing ammo when we're not shooting we should be proactively reloading if we fire two rounds at a target during a drill we reload two rounds if we fire three we load three so both of these techniques include topping off the gun and loading an empty gun for this first technique we're going to start with the primers or the brass part of the shells oriented at the bottom of the side saddle from the firing position I'm going to bring the gun down so the stock is kind of under my arm like this you can reload with the stock still mounted to your shoulder but then you're supporting the whole weight of the gun with just your wrist it gets tiring really quickly and you don't have a whole lot of leverage on the gun if someone were to try and grab it and take it away from you so down here I've lowered the overall profile of the shotgun and I've also got more leverage on it so I can hang on to it a little better so from down here to load the magazine tube I'm going to push a shell out with my thumb and into my hand then bring it up to the loading port and then use my thumb to push it into the magazine tube I want to make sure I get it in there past the shell stops so the spring doesn't just spit the shell back out so that means I've got to get my thumb partially into the magazine tube and then quickly pull it away if I have fired the gun until it's empty then I've got a load the chamber before I can load the magazine tube so with a pump-action I might not know that I'm empty until I get a click so no bang open the action grab the first shell and instead of going to the magazine tube I'm going to bring the shell all the way around and straight into the ejection port now I can do this without even looking at the gun I just put the shell on the receiver and sort of roll it up until it goes into the ejection port and from here I close the action I can come back up on the target and fire or I can stay down here and continue loading the shotgun this other technique I want to show you is one that I recently learned from Daryl bulky and his shotgun class a couple of months ago I'm going to start with the brass up in the side saddle this time and the reason you might want to have the brass up is to prevent the shells from falling out of the loops if you have the brass down when you fire the gun the vibration can kind of shake the shells loose until they fall out of the gun completely this is especially an issue with the hard plastic side saddles I haven't had that problem with the elastic side saddles but it can happen with those eventually because the elastic will wear out so if that's something that you're concerned about the brass up position keeps them from falling out so from here if I just pluck the shell out which would kind of seem to be the obvious thing to do it's not really oriented in my hand in a way to feed it into the mag tube without sort of flipping it like that and there's a good chance I will drop it when I do that so instead I'm going to blade my hand like this and point it toward me now I can use my thumb to push up the shell into my hand and right into the magazine tube kind of like I did with the other technique and here's Daryl demonstrating the technique from the other side of the gun if I've got an empty gun I need to load the chamber from here I'm going to do the same thing bring my hand in push the shell up come under the receiver and then just like I did before right into the ejection port when you've got the shells and the sidesaddle brass up it's probably quicker to just pluck one out rotate the gun around and let gravity work for you and just sort of drop the shell in there and close it like that that can work really well but it requires you to grab the shell in a different way than when you're loading the magazine tube and like I said before I want to have as little thinking involved as possible so I prefer to go under the receiver so I can grab the shell the same way no matter where I need to put it even if it cost me a couple of tenths of a second some people like to mix it up and have brass down for some shells for loading the tube and then keep a couple in there brass up for loading the chamber again this can be really quick and I've seen it work really well for some people but like Daryl pointed out in his class when his attention is focused on a potential threat he doesn't want to have to think about which way the shells are turned and I'm inclined to agree with him on that if I have reached the point where I have to emergency reload my shotgun in my home something has gone horribly wrong I want the most idiot-proof technique possible and I think these two techniques fit that description pretty well now having said that there are a lot of variations on the shotgun reload that can also work really well if you practice them enough to make them second nature

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 1,487,856

Rating: 4.8758779 out of 5

Keywords: shotguns, defensive shotgun, tactical shotgun, shotgun reload, home defense, 12 gauge, remington 870, mossberg 500, shotgun technique, lucky gunner

Id: imY0FT4ZtBc

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2016