More Stuff You Should Know About Buckshot [Part 2]

welcome back to our two-part series all about stuff you should know about buckshot in part one I talked about the different types of buckshot the importance of patterning your buckshot and why a smaller pattern is usually better in the context of protecting your home I left off by mentioning a few common objections to using a type patterning buckshot and I said I would answer those objections this week I will be getting there in just a minute but first let's go back to something else I mentioned last time and we'll call this the fourth thing you should know about buckshot mo makers have employed a few different strategies over the years for controlling the spread of buckshot let's look at a few of the most common ones and whether they actually make a difference this is a round of Rio royal double-aught buck this is the cheap stuff it's really great for practicing but the pattern is completely uncontrolled this is what I would call a basic lead chucker load there's powder down here there's a plastic wad to separate the powder from the pellets and to fill the empty space inside the shell and then you've got the nine plain lead pellets on top and here's the pattern I got with this load this is at 40 feet with a Remington 870 with an 18 inch cylinder bore barrel the pattern is about seven and a half inches wide it's certainly not the worst pattern I've gotten with that barrel but it could be a lot tighter I wouldn't have to worry as much about accidentally throwing a pellet off target the theory is that all of these pellets are trying to get out of the barrel all at once and they slam into each other which creates flat spots on the soft lead then the pellets are no longer perfectly spherical and they don't fly quite as straight so to prevent that sometimes ammo companies will put a buffer compound in the shell to keep the pellets from invading each other's personal space it's usually some kind of granulated synthetic material here is a round of Remington law enforcment reduced recoil 9 pellet double-aught buckshot I cut one of these open and found these little plastic discs they're using as a buffer so let's see what kind of pattern I got with that load that's a 12 inch wide pattern I guess the buffer really didn't do much in this case at least not with this particular barrel usually the buffering is combined with some other features instead of a plain wad for example the pellets might be held together with a plastic shot cup this double-aught 9 pellet Winchester Ranger load has a shot Cup and the more common granulated style buffer but when I tried it in the 870 the pattern was about 10 inches at 40 feet another strategy is to harden the pellets either by changing the formula for the lead or by plating them with something like copper or nickel this is a Fiocchi 3 gun 9 pellet load the pellets are nickel-plated and they're also in a plastic shot cup but there is no buffer my best pattern at 40 feet with this load out of the 870 was just over 6 inches not awesome but a little better than the others here's a remington managed to recoil 8 pellet double-aught load it's got a shot cup similar to the Fiocchi along with a shot buffer I got a pretty nice 5 inch group with this one so far there's not really any predictable connection between a tight pattern and these features that attempt to control the pattern the plating or the shot Cup or the buffer might make a difference but none of these things guarantee a specific pattern size it doesn't mean they don't work it just means that every shotgun barrel is different and you really never know how it's gonna react to a given load you just have to experiment but now let's look at this load this is Hornet II black 8 pellet double-aught buckshot these are plain led pellets there's no buffer just a plastic shot Cup and here is our pattern same gun same distance 40 feet and we've got an impressive three and a half inch wide pattern that's because this is not just a generic shot Cup this is what Hornady calls the Versa tightwad it's the same technology they use in their critical defense and law enforcement tap buckshot it's also the same as the federal flight control wad both Hornady and federal either buy these or license the design from the same third party for the flight control loads federal doesn't just use a special Y they also copperplate the pellets and they've got a shot buffer in there as well the result is that with the majority of cylinder borsch guns you will get the tightest possible buckshot pattern with one of the federal flight control loads here's my 40-foot pattern with the 870 and the a pellet version of the double-aught flight control just two and a half inches now at forty feet do I really care whether I'm getting two and a half inches with the flight control or three and a half with the Hornady black not really personally I prefer the flight control because it's a lower-velocity load it's 1145 feet per second it's a softer shooting load it's easier to control than the 1600 foot per second Hornet II and also don't have to worry as much about over penetration now what about the 9 pellet version of flight control let's look at that pattern we've got a really nice group of eight pellets right here together and then who's this little guy that is pellet number nine and now I need to talk about the fifth thing you should know about buckshot then ninth pellet flyer it doesn't happen every time but it's very common for nine pellet double-aught buckshot to have one pellet that kind of has a mind of its own I'll show you some more examples here's that Rio Royal led Tucker load that we looked at earlier I patterned it with a Beretta 1301 at 40 feet and got one pellet that was four and a half inches away from the group nine pellet flight-control out of the thirty no one did the same thing not quite as drastic but still significant I have yet to hear a really detailed explanation for why this happens according to Tom Gibbons who knows more about shotguns than most it has to do with how the pellets are stacked inside the shell a pellet buckshot is arranged in four rows of two pellets each nine pellet buckshot comes in three rows of three for some reason that configuration sometimes causes one pellet to go off on its own a couple more examples here's arms core 9 pellet with the 870 and Remington reduced recoil 9 pellet with the 1301 and that same load with the 870 remember what I said last time about a wide pattern giving you a smaller margin of error you can see I pulled this shot just a little high and it still would have been a good shot with a tighter pattern but that one pellet ended up completely off the paper this isn't just a theoretical problem there are documented cases people being killed by single pellets that missed the intended target compare those to some of the eight pellet loads I tested they aren't all tight patterns but there is not a trend of single pellet flyers now Flyers do occasionally happen with eight pellet loads but in general that eight pellets shells are more predictable of course as always you have to pattern the load in your shotgun to see what it does but if all else is equal I would choose an eight pellet load over a nine pellet load and it's probably gonna be flight control at indoor distances I'll get a one-hole group for maximum terminal effect and it's got moderate velocity so those pellets are more likely to stay in the bad guy the sixth thing you should know about buckshot is one that I'll address really quickly using choke tubes with buckshot I know some of you are wondering why we don't just use a gun that's threaded for chokes and switch to a tighter choke tube if we want a smaller pattern most of the 18-inch guns that are set up for self-defense use don't come threaded for chokes but some of them do you can use choke tubes but they don't work quite the same way with buckshot as they do with birdshot buckshot pellets don't compress as easily especially the big double-aught pellets remember those pellets might already be smacking into each other on the way out the barrel and that can make the pattern wider if we choke down on that opening too much it's kind of like the front door of Walmart on Black Friday the pellets won't actually get stuck but we've almost guaranteed that there's gonna be collisions and that's not good for our pattern that said sometimes a little bit of a choke can help with the pattern so if you want to see what your gun does with and improve cylinder or modified choke knock yourself out you could try going all the way down to a full choke but don't be surprised if your pattern actually opens back up one thing I have been able to confirm from personal experience is that federal flight control and the Hornady versa tight loads tend to not work well with chokes barrels that special wad travels with the pellets and holds them together until about ten yards or so but a choke can cause the wad to separate from the pellets before it's supposed to if you want a tight pattern you don't want to have to rely on specialty loads like flight control an alternative to chokes would be to send your barrel to van comp systems they will perform their magic on your barrel which essentially has the same effect as a choke without deforming the pellets they guarantee a 10 to 12 inch wide pattern at 25 yards which is excellent by any standard they will also port the barrel to cut down on recoil a little bit van Kampf has been doing this for something like 30 years and they have a stellar reputation in the industry like any premium gunsmithing it's not gonna be cheap but if you've got the budget for it it may be a worthwhile upgrade okay now I want to come back around and try to answer some of those common objections to using a type patterning buckshot for self defense this preference for smaller patterns is a somewhat recent trend in self defense oriented shotgun training twenty or thirty years ago it was more common for people to talk about wanting a somewhat wider pattern and some people still follow that line of thinking they'll usually say the whole reason for using a shotgun to begin with is because that wider spread makes it more likely that you'll hit the target with at least some pellets that might be true for moving targets and longer distances but at the kind of range that we're looking at in most homes getting a hit with a shoulder-fired weapon is really not that difficult like I talked about last time if you've got a wider pattern the hard part is making sure that all of those pellets stay in the target when some of them are four or five inches away from the point of aim you might be responding to the screams of a family member who's trying to get away from this predator that's broken into your home the last thing you want is to have to worry about whether your pattern is tight enough to hit the threat and not your loved one so if that's the case why not just use slugs forget the pattern all together and just make one big hole with one big chunk of lead I think there are some merit to that approach slugs are certainly very effective and there are a lot more predictable in terms of what direction they go but not necessarily in terms of how far they go most slugs are pretty good at penetrating hard barriers and if you let one of those go in your house doesn't hit the target there's no telling where it's gonna end up some of these segmenting slugs or other specialty slugs might help to mitigate that excessive haar barrier penetration I don't want to see some pretty extensive testing on that before I would be willing to rely on slugs in my house using buckshot doesn't eliminate that problem but it does mitigate it especially with the lower velocity loads taking that objection even further why not just use a carbine instead of a shotgun that would give us one projectile per trigger press and it's a lot more predictable than either buckshot or a slug when five five six hits hard barriers it tends to tumble and rapidly lose velocity depending on the load it might even be less likely to penetrate exterior or interior walls than a pistol caliber I don't have anything against carbines they're certainly easier to use than a shotgun or a handgun they probably are the best choice for a lot of people the main reason I like shotguns for home defense is that they are really really effective a single round of buckshot to the torso almost always results in an immediate change of behavior I've talked to guys who have seen a fair amount of combat overseas and they seem to like the m4 just fine but they almost never shoot anybody just once or twice with 556 from what I understand three to five rounds minimum is more or less standard operating procedure if you expect the guy to stay down now I can run an AR pretty fast but every trigger pull is an opportunity to make a life-altering mistake if given the choice I would prefer to fire as few shots as possible that's why for me the shotgun is the superior choice at close range eight pellet federal flight control will make a pattern between the size of a quarter and a baseball at any range inside my house there's very little chance of a stray pellet with a pattern like that if I'm faced with a deadly threat I just have to get one round in the upper body and that's almost guaranteed to be the end of it that's less opportunity for them to harm me or my family it's less opportunity for me to fire a shot that misses and hits a family member or a neighbor it takes a little more work to reach a level of unconscious competence with a shotgun but me it's worth it because it's a tool that has the greatest potential to end the fight quickly no matter what firearm you choose to protect your home with please remember that you are fully accountable for every bullet projectile whatever that leaves that barrel get a bright light to go with that gun get some training get a lot of practice and get your ammo 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Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

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Id: Jf4i8gRTsJs

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020