Practical Drills for the Home Defense Shotgun

there are a lot of different ways to overcomplicate the defensive shotgun but if your goal is to train for the purposes of home protection I think it's best to keep things pretty straightforward there are basically two aspects of the defensive shotgun that I like to spend most of my time at the range focusing on first the manipulations in my experience this is one of the most difficult parts of learning to run the shotgun well quickly loading and reloading and if it's a pump running the slide so we want to make sure we get a lot of repetitions on those basic manipulations so that we don't have to put any conscious thought into making the gun function the other big thing to work on is mounting the gun so bringing it up on target from our ready position for home defense we're probably dealing with an unknown threat and we don't want to point the gun at anyone or anything unless we're pretty sure we have to shoot it and that can happen very quickly so we need to work on getting that gun up on target and making sure that first hit is an accurate one the big advantage of the shotgun is its ability to end a fight very quickly but that's dependent on the users ability to operate the shotgun properly and to get quick and accurate hits so with those goals in mind I'm going to suggest for defensive shotgun drills that I have kind of gathered and adapted from a few different sources I think if you practice these drills and you get pretty comfortable with them then you'll be well on your way to becoming competent with the shotgun for the purpose of home defense if you want to run these drills the way that I'm going to demonstrate you will need five things a pump-action or semi-automatic shotgun some weight to store ammo on the gun like a sidesaddle or stock mounted shell carrier a shot timer a few silhouette style targets and some bird shot or buckshot I'm going to demo all these drills with birdshot at five yards I'll go out much farther than that the targets get torn up too quickly and I can't tell what I'm hitting at five yards if I can keep most of my pellets inside the center ring then I should be able to do the same thing with buckshot at longer ranges at the end of a practice session I might grab a few rounds of buckshot and run some of these drills out at ten 15 or even 20 yards basically inside the house tight distances just to make sure that I can still keep my pattern roughly in the center of the target for this first drill I'm just focusing on mounting the gun quickly so when the timer beeps I'm going to bring the gun up on target and just fire one shot with all of these drills I'm going to be starting from a ready position it can either be high ready like this or low ready I like to change it up and work on both but either way the main focus of the drill is on making sure I can get into a firing stance really quickly and get sights on target if I'm using a pump-action I'm also going to be paying attention to manipulating the slide so I'm going to run the slide immediately after every shot to make it part of my follow-through I want to make sure that that becomes second nature to me for this next drill I'm going to focus a little more on the follow-through it's going to look just like the first drill except I'm going to mount and fire two shots instead of just one this drill lets me practice mounting the gun but it also forces me to have good follow-through since I have to make that second shot so I'm working on my ability to control recoil and also manipulate the slide without short stroking it and you can add as many shots to this drill as you want you can mount and fire three or four rounds or go through a whole magazine it's a good idea to change it up a little bit so you don't accidentally program yourself to always fire the same number of shots for this next drill I need to start with a round in the chamber at least one round in the magazine tube and ammo on my shell carrier so I'm going to mount fire one round and then reload one round into the tube from my shell carrier and then fire a second round there are a bunch of different techniques for reloading the shotgun and that's not really something I'm going to cover today but whatever technique you choose adding the time pressure and trying to do it as fast as you can is going to expose some weaknesses you're going to find out where you're most likely to fumble and make mistakes so that hopefully you can avoid them in the future and just like with the other drill you can change up the round count the idea is to just get in the habit of loading that to whenever you're not shooting on this last drill I'm going to work on reloading the shotgun from empty so I'm going to start with one round in the chamber an empty magazine tube and ammo on my shell carrier I'm going to mount fire one round and then load two rounds into the empty shotgun and then fire those two this drill can get a little tricky with a pump action shotgun the reality is I'm not going to be able to count my shots so I'm not going to know I'm empty until I try to fire and I get a click instead of a bang so when I'm running the drill I'm going to fire the first round and then I'm going to try to fire the second round and get that click and then I'm going to open the action and load one round directly into the receiver then load the second round into the magazine tube and then I'll fire those two shots with a semi-auto I run this drill a little differently because when the gun is empty the trigger goes dead and the bolt locks open so I can skip right to the reloading step of course just like the other drills you can change up the round count you can start with more ammo in the gun and you can vary the number of rounds that you reload realistically it is extremely unlikely that you would ever have to fire enough rounds to run your shotgun dry in an actual home defense encounter but trying out this drill gives you a lot of opportunity to get really familiar with running the shotgun and you're going to discover every type of user error imaginable and you'll learn how to fix them on the fly you don't have to go to the range to practice a lot of this stuff you can get really proficient with shotgun manipulations just by practicing at home with dummy shells like these so don't underestimate the value of dry practice if you've got any shotgun drills that you like to use or any variations on the ones that I've suggested be sure to let us know about them in the comments member

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 601,795

Rating: 4.9401031 out of 5

Keywords: shotgun, home defense, shotgun drills, Remington 870, Beretta 1301, tactical shotgun, self-defense

Id: w0uoLNB-pTo

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/3LTee]

Do you feel like working a shotgun into your training has helped your proficiency on other platforms? I’d imagine recoil control is a skill that seems way easier after running a shotgun.