Paul's Top Five Guns for Home Defense.

by today I'm remaking my presentation on home events guns because based on the commentary I realized there were some points that I had failed to make clear a lot of people had a lot of misunderstanding most of which were my fault so bear with me if I cover material I previously covered there with me if I repeat myself if I repeat myself because there's some points I want to make sure I make clear home defense guns come with a litany of criteria to consider things like do you live by yourself or are there multiple people in the home that may need to use this gun and is it the right gun for everyone things like is your guns stored in such a way that it's readily available to you but not accessible to little children concerns with overpenetration list goes on at Astra and things like this are of paramount importance to some people while they don't even apply to other people that's why when someone asked me what is the best home defense gun I had to give the party line answer if there is no best gun there's just what works best for you well the inexorable follow-up question is people ask what kind of guns do I keep in my houses for home defense fair enough so let me show you my top five and remember these are not recommendations they're just what works best for me first on my list is a plain old double action revolver easy to store very simple to operate all you got to do is pull the trigger they can be very effective my personal choice is the Smith & Wesson Model 29 44 Magnum there are a lot of criticisms of handguns like this one of the biggest ones being that because it's so powerful it has a great potential for overpenetration endangered innocent bystanders that can be a very valid concern but in my particular case it really just doesn't apply another criticism of handguns like this is because they're so powerful and they have a lot of recoil that they'll really slow you down for subsequent shots well let's shoot okay me one of the other criticisms that revolvers know around most revolvers hold five or six this one holds six and although accurate statistics on how many rounds of citizen fires and home defense shooting are really hard to get I think you'll find that most of the time the situation was resolved with less than six rounds and if it isn't you can certainly reload one of the things is I hear people say that revolvers can't be efficiently reloaded in the dark well the only thing I can say to that is that you might notice that right now I'm reloading this revolver without looking at it and while being distracted by talking to you and that's with loose ammunition with a speed loader it'd be quite a bit easier and a whole lot faster the idea that revolvers can't be reloaded in the dark is pure fiction next on my list is a plain old shotgun lots of good ones out there a lot of people like Auto loaders even a double barrel can be very useful I have a video specifically on doubles and their role as a home defense gun but my preference is a pump let me show you two really good ones this is a remington 870 and this is a Mossberg 500 and any of the many versions of 870 or 500 or 590 or any one in that series are probably the most popular choices for personal protection purposes and with good reason they're both really good guns shotguns at close range can be very effective and if loaded properly with a small buckshot like number four or a large birdshot like number two or bb's they can retain that close-range effectiveness while greatly reducing their potential for over penetration now when we're talking about pump shotguns as a home defense gun there's two topics that always come up that I have to cover and fair warning we'll get back to shooting in a few minutes but for right now this is the boring part of the video where I talk the first thing is what's called the rack the slide deterrent now what that means is that when you see someone about to do something violent you rack the slide and put a round in the chamber of your shotgun and that acts as a warning and will dissuade them from doing whatever violent thing they were going to do okay that always comes up when we're talking about shotguns but that is not the sole bailiwick of the pump shotgun you can do it with lots of different guns you can do it with a lever action rifle help you can do it with an autoloading pistol halt you can do it with an auto loading rifle hope the thing is when you do that that rack the slide deterrent rarely works anybody who's been around this business very much will probably tell you the exact same thing I'm saying in fact believe it or not in real life I had to do that once and it did not dissuade anyone and I ended up having to kill somebody just my life experience take it for what it's worth but I get similar reports from other people the rack the slide deterrent rarely is effective the second thing is the age-old debate of whether or not to store your home defense pump shotgun with a loaded chamber or an empty chamber there's a lot of people in both camps and they have lots of reasons to support why they are adamantly one way or the other I could probably go on for an hour about just this one topic but I'll try to keep it short and I'll just cover what I consider to be the top two or three reasons on each side as far as reasons to have around in the chamber it one will give you one more shot this particular 870 has a five shot tube if you have one in the chamber you have a sixth there's also the matter of it allows you to go into action quietly without having to rack the slide you're not giving away your position or giving away your intent both of those things make sense but I gotta say that they are of marginal validity in a legitimate home defense shooting where the gun in question is a shotgun usually those shootings are resolved in one or two shots that's why I say even a double-barrel it can be viable and I have yet to find a case where someone fired over five shots so when you're starting out with a gun like this Mossberg with a seven shot tube adding an eight I don't think really gives you that much of an advantage also as far as giving away your position now that makes sense and it is applicable sometimes but for the most part in a home defense shooting that just isn't part of what's going on but the number one reason I would say to have around in the chamber is reliability I've discussed this before on the topic of autoloading pistols what happens is if you have a round in the chamber then to get this gun to fire you have to disengage the safety and pull the trigger when you do that there is a chance the gun won't go off you may fail to disengage the safety completely the round in the chamber may be a dud whatever but if you have to add the step of putting a round in the chamber then there are more things that can go wrong you have increased exponentially your chances of some kind of mishap usually one caused by you the most common one being short stroking the slide so just as a matter of reliability having around in the chamber can be a big plus now the reasons to not have a round in the chamber there's a few of them two really big ones one of those is when you put a round in the chamber of this shotgun there is an internal hammer in here that is cocked and if you're like most people you leave your pump shotgun sitting there at your house loaded 24/7 for months on end even if you're somebody who takes your gun to the range one day a month that'd be a lot more than most people do but even if you do that you're still letting your guns sit there cocked 29 days out of 30 and there are people who will tell you that spring compression doesn't damage anything but I'm going to tell you that I have seen guns that have incurred damage and that would no longer work reliably due to nothing more than having had their hammer spring compressed for an excessive period of time and I've got a video where I go on for 20 minutes about just springg compression so if you got 20 minutes and nothing better to do you can watch that but the short version is I have actually seen guns incurred damage because of that but the much bigger reason to have an empty chamber is that most pump shotguns when you put a round in the chamber they have an internal hammer that is cocked and they are not designed to be dropped safe even with the safety engaged if you hit that gun hard enough or drop it it can bounce that sear and go off now I'm not gonna hit my gun with a mallet enough times to set it off just to prove the point but if you look on YouTube and look up gun failures you will see quite a few videos where somebody knocked their gun over and it went off some of those videos are fake but some of them are real and that to me is the biggest reason to store with an empty chamber but with good reasons on both sides I can say that the only person who can really decide what's right for you is you but since we're talking about my favourite guns how do I store it and what kind of condition do I keep mine in and how do I address this problem let me show you something my choice for a pump shotgun is a winchester model 1897 and it works pretty well now let me give you a close-up view of it now the way this gun works is it's a pump shotgun with an exposed hammer while pointed in a safe direction you put around in the chamber and your hammer is cocked and then while still pointed in the safe direction you lower the hammer to the half cocked position for safety you can see the safety concerns of this there's been a lot of people that have ventilated their roofs with guns like this but what this does is now with around in the chamber and the hammer and half [ __ ] there's no spring tension on the hammer and because the hammer is forward its drop safe you're not going to bounce that sear you'd have to hit this hammer with a hammer to break that internal half [ __ ] system and get it to go off and so it gives me the advantages of a loaded chamber but none of the disadvantages now this is not a gun for everyone it has a couple of safety concerns one with hammer we already saw also when you work the slide on this gun what happens is the bolt comes straight back and if your hand is not in the right position you can shear the skin off the top of your thumb but what I really like about this gun is because of the way it looks and what it is if I had to use it I just looked like an old geezer with a gun in his closet as where if you use a more modern gun like this especially if you start tricking it out with the pistol grip for stock and the sidesaddle cartridge loops and the bayonet lug and the laser sight and all that other stuff now a flashlight on a gun can be a good idea but when you start putting all those other things especially when this gun has the word tactical stamped right in it it can get you looked at with a jaundiced eye and a police investigation now you've seen my big handgun but sometimes you need a small handgun that you can put in a pocket or in your belt and go to the door and not be so obtrusive well what fits the bill for me is the car arms PM 40 now this is not an endorsement of car arms some people love them I have not had very good luck with them but this one and I don't mean this model I mean this particular gun has worked out written well for me and it's got two big things going for it one it's a small gun but it's still a caliber 40 Smith & Wesson so it's fairly powerful and - it has the tritium illuminated sights a real plus if you have to shoot in the dark when you buy it it comes with two magazines I've got a five shot magazine in it but it also comes with a six-shot mag that has a foot on it so you can get a little bit better grip on it so let's shoot this thing and being an auto loader you can keep an extra magazine in your pocket really easily not bad at all let me show you another small gun I really like the Smith & Wesson Model 638 it's a five shot double action revolver in caliber 38 special it's got a couple of features I really like one of them is the shrouded hammer now there's a lot of good hammerless revolvers out there but I like the shrouded hammer because occasionally I like the option of being able to [ __ ] the hammer and being shrouded means I can get it in and out of my pocket without it catching on anything let's shoot it not bad at all now it is just a five-shot revolver but there are speed motors available for it now let me show you the other thing I really like about this gun another thing I really like about this gun is because it's an air weight it's very light I can put it in the pocket of my PT shorts and it won't weigh them down also because it's a revolver with a shrouded hammer if things get too dicey I can shoot from my pocket now everybody make your snub nose jokes ha ha ha ha ha ok let me show you another gun I've got one more gun I want to show you now we've seen some handguns and we've seen some shotguns but what about a rifle generally speaking a rifle isn't really a good first choice for home defense gun but some people want that option problem is when I say rifle people start thinking of an ar-15 or m16 platform or an a platform in caliber 7.62 by 39 and although rifles like that can be very effective I heard someone say ak-47 when you absolutely positively got a kill every last person in the room well there's a lot of truth to that but 7.62 by 39 has a well deserved reputation for over penetration and ar-15 platform rifles which are usually in caliber 556 NATO can have very long maximum effective ranges the a2 has a maximum effective range by textbook of 550 meters on a point target which is probably a little more than what you need for a home defense gun so what gun would I select that would have a short enough overall length to be usable in a house powerful enough to get the job done but not quite such a tendency toward drastic long range or over penetration like the 760 2 by 39 has well what works for me is the beretta cx4 storm rifle in caliber 9-millimeter now a lot of people might think 9-millimeter is an insufficient caliber and you might have a point but remember out of a rifle barrel it'll have a little more umph than out of the pistol and this rifle also comes in caliber 40 Smith and Wesson and 45 acp now I selected this one because it uses the same magazines as the beretta 92 IFS pistol which I already had so this rifle made a logical choice this also has the features of it has the rail system so you can add all those doodads that I really don't care for and you can arrange it to where the charging handle is on the left or the right and you can make it eject out the right or the left I've got mine set up to eject on the right with the charging handle on the left so let's shoot this thing there's a lot of variations but your typical 92fs magazine is a 15 shot magazine which may not seem like a lot but for home defense purposes it should be plenty not bad at all short carbines like this can be brought into action very quickly not bad at all but there's people that have the tendency to think that rifles like this can be fired from the hip or some kind of assault position and that'll be highly effective let's put that to the test well that might look cool but it really wasn't any faster and certainly not any more accurate than just aiming was well there's my top 5 and remember those are not recommendations they're just what works best for me but in addition to home defense guns I want to cover one other point that's a home defense plan now in the military in creating a defense plan we had an acronym ko ko key terrain features observation and fields of fire covering concealment obstacles avenues of approach and you apply those same principles to your home defense plan although certainly not in quite the same way and in doing that I would tell you you have to prepare for those scenarios that are more likely before those that are least likely now there's some guy on you and he's got a lot of home defense videos and he says you will almost always be invaded in a home invasion robbery between two and five people storming your home with quick and overwhelming force that's fact one is it now maybe he's speaking specifically about home invasion robberies while I'm speaking generically about instances in which you use your home defense gun but I find that to be rather less likely than the scenario of a burglar enters your house when he thinks you're not there and then instead of running when you discover your home he does something violent to you I'd consider that far more likely one day I was talking on the phone to one of my crew who is a retired police officer my doorbell rings and he asks do I need to get that and tell him no I looked through the window if it's not somebody I know I don't answer the door and he says get ready to have the back door kicked in because he's dealt with that scenario many many times a burglar comes to the front door knocks on the door determined you're not home goes around back kicks the door in steals your stuff I find those scenarios to be far more likely and not only those but ladies that creepy ex-boyfriend of yours that has declared that he can't have you no one can him coming over to your house and doing something violent to you or whatever other pervo or rapist or the list goes on I find those things to be far more plausible than between two and five people storming a home and quick an overwhelming force and while I'm talking about preparing for more likely before less likely I see people by $800 hand and then they'll go out and buy $40 boxes of ammunition but I can't get them to spray it for the five dollars it would take to buy batteries and make sure their smoke detectors work you must prepare for the things that are more likely are your household cleansers and poisons out of the reach of little children now I don't want to belabor this point but my brother is a deputy sheriff and has been for over 25 years and in that time he has never shot at anyone nor been shot at but he did have a kitchen fire and saved the day with a home fire extinguisher just like this that he paid 25 bucks for those scenarios that are more likely before those that are least likely now there's one other home security device I want to show you there's one more thing I want to show you for home defense and that's a dog now she's a Newfoundland he's an Irish Wolfhound and in reality she's about as mean as a marshmallow he's about as tough as tapioca but that's not really the point the main thing is people who could come into your home uninvited usually don't like dogs of any kind let alone a dog this size and the main thing a dog can do for you in his bark a wiener dog can do that I just happen to like these particular breeds so as always don't try this at home I'm what you call a professional and thanks for watching my top five guns for home defense video

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 3,139,454

Rating: 4.9008465 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: K4FESGjiH3s

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/h-vega]

Primary is a ruger carbine 9mm with the mlok rails, venom red dot and inforce light. Secondary is a Glock 19 with inforce light and night sights, also an Xd45 with a light and sights. But definitely if SHTF is the mossberg 500 pistol grip with a light, opsol adapter and 8 rounds of federal mini shell buck.

[u/TeamLenin]

My man, Paul Harrell!

[u/Beanye]

its interesting that he says having a loaded shell will wear out a Mossberg over time. Now I wonder if i should not have it loaded.