Shotguns don't suck for Home Defense!!

hi we're out on the range today so as usual bear with any gunfire you hear in the background recently I was watching a youtube video and some guy comes on there and he proclaims shotguns sucked for home defense yeah he said it he then went on for over thirty five minutes to explain and demonstrate why he thought that well I happen to disagree with most of the points he made and I disagree with most of the conclusions he came to normally it would not be my place or in any way my desire to critique or criticize other people's work but in this particular case he also said that he was sick of the keyboard commandos that want to tell you their opinion but not tell you why that want to tell you things but not back up anything they say with solid logic or experience I took that as an invitation that he wanted to hear from people with opinions different than his own as long as they could back those opinions up with some kind of evidence so here we are now in the interest of brevity I don't want to drone on for thirty five minutes I can't address every point he made but we'll see if we can hit some of the high points so let's take a look in his assertion that shotguns suck for home defense he talks about the problem of over penetration in fact it mentions that several times I have to presume that what he means by that is that a 12-gauge shotgun will penetrate through common building materials what houses are typically made of more so than an ar-15 m16 platform rifle and caliber 5.56 nato well let's put that to the test let me show you something what i've got here is what would be a very typical interior wall a two-by-four frame with 1/2 inch thick sheetrock on each side now this wall does not have any studs in it typical houses will have two by four studs 16 inch center and that gives you about a one in ten chance of actually hitting one of those those studs if you shot through it so we remove that extraneous variable and just have nothing in here at all now let's go on down this second wall is the same exact thing no studs nothing in there half-inch thick sheetrock on each side these here are just braces to keep the whole thing from falling apart now let's go on down one more this is a very typical exterior 1/2 inch thick sheetrock on the inside and on the outside half inch thick plywood and this cheap particleboard siding the question that comes up right now is is there insulation in here and the answer is it doesn't matter I'm not going to shoot insulation for you today to make the point but people get the idea that the typical insulation that pink fiberglass with the paper backing is a bullet stop it's not i've actually shot an entire roll of insulation 24 layers with a 38 special out of a snubnose barrel the bullet went through all 24 layers and still went into about 6 inches of dirt insulation is not a bullet stop so an answered your question no there's none in here the other thing I've got is down here on the outside of our wall we've got our row of innocent bystanders the question is not just can't a bullet go through but if it does does it have enough to do anything is it just going to bump one of our bystanders and knock him over or is it going to blow them to pieces we'll find out a couple other things I want to cover is you see that the distance between these walls is only 5 feet not the typical 8 10 or even 12 feet that a room would be I had to condense that just to fit pull thing on the range and it shouldn't make that much difference another thing is the FBI has been telling us for decades that your mean average distance for a lethal confrontation is 7 yards inside your house unless you live at stately Wayne Manor with Batman is probably going to be a lot less than that 7 yards so we're going to shoot this back here from 4 yards and that shouldn't change our results too much so let's shoot this and see what happens I'm going to shoot from the prone just so I can get the impacts lower on the wall that way later I can shoot from the kneeling and have impacts in a different place and not have to change my sheetrock so many times interesting results now here's our first wall and as you can see these bullet holes are pretty round the bullets are still going straight when they come out let's check the wall on the other side of this room fairly round hole but a lot of these are tumbling as they hit this second wall a tumbling bullet like that loses a lot of its ability to penetrate here's the interior of our exterior wall the inside of our outside wall every single one of these bullet holes is sideways every one of those bullets was almost completely sideways when it hit and did you notice how our nice five shot pattern has changed they've been deflected a great deal but they still penetrated bottom line is did the bullets go all the way through yes they did and hit our jugs with very decisive effect the one that didn't get burst that's only because the bullet hit so low that it hit this two by six here and just knocked it off without actually hitting the jug but all the jugs that were hit you would not have liked to have been an innocent bystander so do rifles over penetrate yes we pretty much all knew that now let's see what the shotgun does by comparison okay the 223 amo went through there pretty quick and pretty easy so let's try the shotgun now this is 12-gauge two and three-quarter inch double-aught buck but this is twelve pellet so let's see how this does and we'll shoot this from the prone to you can see after these come through this first wall they're still in a fairly tight pattern but in the five feet between this wall in the next when they open up quite a bit let's take a look these pellets are now getting spread out quite a bit they're covering quite a bit of area now let's go look at our exterior wall now these pellets have gone through two interior walls and they've traveled a total of 22 feet and they're spread out quite a bit if you were just shooting directly at this they wouldn't have spread out so much going through the two walls prior to hitting this spread them out a little bit more but the real story is on the other side so did the double-aught buckshot over penetrate well yeah of course no more so than the rifle did and with slightly less damage to some of the jugs that hit really interesting thing this jug got hit by three doublet pellets and all three of those pellets are still in here I'm looking at him right now so they did less damage to the jugs after going through the wall but still plenty of damage that you wouldn't want to be hit with one this one here was right in the centre of a bunch of pellets coming out of there and got missed so does the shotgun over penetrate when loaded with double-aught buck yes but really no more so than the rifle does now let's try something different so as he saw so far the double-aught buck really did over penetrate but not really any more so than typical 223 ammo in making the video shotguns sucked for home defense he talked only about double-aught buck and I presume he's aware of this but just in case you're not I'll let you in on a secret there's more than one kind of shotgun ammo what I've got loaded in here now is 12-gauge two and three-quarter inch number four buckshot now that's not to be confused with number four birdshot this is number four buckshot number four buckshot depending on which source you read is either 22 or 24 caliber to the best of my knowledge it's 22 caliber by contrast the double lot we were using is 33 caliber so you get a smaller pellet but you get 27 pellets instead of just the 9 or 12 so it's a trade-off the question then becomes well is it effective I can tell you two things on that one a couple of colleagues of mine have killed deer with number four buckshot stop a deer right in its tracks so yeah it's effective too there's an excellent video on YouTube and it's called 12-gauge gel test number four buckshot or gel test 12-gauge number four buckshot it's about 2 minutes long the guy coronagraphs it and he shoots the clear ballistic gel with a number 4 buckshot excellent video I'm not going to repeat that work just watch that one but in terms of shooting our building materials here will it or will it not go through like the double lot did let's find out and we'll shoot this from the kneeling so we won't go through the same holes ok here we are at the interior of the exterior wall and here's your double out holes down here and your number 4 buckshot up here so they've already gone through two interior walls and they've been here but the real story is on the other side of this wall so did the shotgun with number four buckshot over penetrate well it did go through two interior walls but it did not go through the exterior wall and as you saw just the off-the-shelf 223 ammo came right through there and sprayed these jugs all over the place so when you compare a shotgun to a rifle for over penetration on common building materials just a shotgun over penetrate in comparison to rifle and the answer is no not if you load it right but you might still have the question well is that number for buckshot really effective let's see if we can demo that like I said before if you doubt the effectiveness of number four buckshot watch that 12-gauge gel test video the guy made and make up your own mind after seeing that or watch what I'm going to do right now look pretty effective to me in any discussion of defensive shotgun the question always comes up what about a 20 gauge well I'm glad you asked because I brought out this neat old Remington Model 11 20 gauge it's got a two and three-quarter inch chamber now what I've got it loaded with is Remington 20 gauge two and three-quarter inch number three buckshot number three buckshot is 25 caliber as compared to the number four buckshots 22 or 24 caliber and in a 20 gauge shotgun you get 20 pellets of the number three buckshot the reason I've got it loaded with this is because the number three buckshot is the pretty much the only one you ever find at the store I know others exist but this is by far the most common the thing about shotguns is the 20 gauge is often perceived as to be way less powerful than a 12-gauge and you really shouldn't perceive it that way but we'll see what it really does when we shoot through our wall well the number three buckshot pellets went for both interior walls and the sheetrock side of this but didn't go through here so effective yes over penetrate no okay you want to see how effective the number three buckshot is looks okay to me and now I know that's not a super definitive scientific test but it is kind of fun and it does illustrate the point well that was interesting enough but what about some household appliances well a few years ago I made a video where I shot a refrigerator with both an ar-15 platform rifle and a shotgun I don't want to redo that so I'm just going to show you the video I made a few years ago and yes this was made several years ago so you just have to deal with the hairstyle let's take a look okay that really impressed me did not penetrate but the force of that bump coming out there knocked our bookshelf over but our jug is still safe so against a shotgun your refrigerator does pretty good okay so the refrigerator does pretty well against a shotgun now without the wall in front of it and shooting from the side how will it do against the rifle without the wall and shooting through the side 223 you're pretty well done in not only that look at this two-by-four you can see that the bullets came clear through and shot through this 2x4 and out the back of it so inside your house shooting with this rifle you're in trouble okay everybody take a moment make fun of my hair hah hah hah hah hah and no you won't see porn videos of me anywhere on the Internet you won't but anyway after shooting all of that stuff as far as over penetration I don't see that shotguns over penetrate as compared to a ar-15 platform rifles at all but let's go on to the next segment in his assertion that shotguns suck he pointed out that their rate of fire and magazine capacity is very poor compared to a rifle specifically an m16 platform and he demonstrated that by shooting 10 rounds out of an m16 platform in a time of I think two and a half seconds and then 10 rounds out of a pump shotgun in a time of 17 seconds now I know that seems like a long time but remember the shotgun only has a seven shot capacity so his shooter had to reload three rounds so it did in fact take a long time so let me see if I can recreate those results that they got because after all good science is verifiable falsifiable and repeatable so let's see how we do okay that's pretty close to theirs after shooting there ten rounds out of the rifle he shot ten rounds out of a pump shotgun now that took 17 seconds but again there was reload in there and the man that did that described himself as a 3-gun pro I'm certainly not a 3-gun pro but let's see how well I can do okay that's not a bad time but remember I'm not a 3-gun Pro so we shot ten rounds out of the rifle and ten rounds out of the shotgun and what did we prove well we proved the axiom that an auto loading rifle with a thirty shot magazine can shoot ten rounds faster than a pump-action shotgun with a seven shot magazine I readily concede the rifle can shoot faster but that's not really the question the question is is that relevant think about this here in America in the last 25 years how many times has it happened that a citizen has used a shotgun and I'm not talking about police shootings or gang drive-bys or any that I'm talking about a citizen using a shotgun to defend their home how many times does that happen in the last 25 years probably hundreds how many times has it happened where a citizen has fired more than five rounds let alone ten I can't find a single example of that if anyone can please share it and if you do share such information it can't be a story that starts with my uncle told me it's got to be some real documentation but anyway I don't think the ten rounds test is relevant at all not only in the number of rounds fired but also in the thought that I can't imagine anything just standing there letting you shoot ten rounds at it that doesn't seem realistic to me so let's try a more realistic comparison let's shoot five shots at five targets that will simulate multiple targets or something moving and then see how much faster the rifle is now let's try the shotgun and see how that compares now let's compare those results to a shotgun and yes to make it fair I'm going to compare an auto loading rifle to an Auto loading shot now what's the rifle faster and the real question is was it enough faster to matter you be the judge while we're traveling today and I'm talking to a colleague of mine this is Chuck now Chuck you know that I own quite a few shotguns but my primary home defense shotgun is this winchester model 1897 now you keep a shotgun in your home for home defense don't worry I do there's a smart bird poo okay yeah I installed an aftermarket stock for grip on it and how you like those that works okay okay now I was watching a presentation on shotguns recently and there was an expert on there who described himself as a SWAT cop saying that shotguns suck for home defense and I was where to used suck and he cited a lot of reasons but one of the reasons he cited that both of our guns suck is because they're not consistent with each other obviously with the exposed hammer as a postal safety mind works very differently than yours and then the slide release works very differently and so on what'd you think about that well I don't really need to know how your gun works I just need to know how my denver's worked very well really okay I'm still traveling now I'm in a different colleagues house this is Saul now Saul you know that I own several shotguns but my very own defense shotgun is this winchester model 1897 now you keep shotgunning in your house for home defense tell me about yours well this is a Remington 870 okay got an 18 inch barrel he's gonna aftermarket magazine extension holds six rounds plus some aftermarket folding stock excellent now I was putting a video presentation recently and there was some guy who described himself as a SWAT cop saying that shotguns suck for home defense as his turn okay and he said many reasons why they suck one of them was because they're different from each other making them more difficult to master as in both of ours suck because there's so much different from each other what do you think of that well in my house with my shotgun I don't give a damn how your shotgun works really well there you have it and like I said at the beginning and the interest of brevity I couldn't address every point that he and it just tried to hit some of the big ones over penetration not by anything I could demonstrate here today and the idea that shotguns are inadequate to the task because of their perceived lower rate of fire or the relatively limited magazine capacity I don't think that's all that relevant and I think today's demonstration and the statistics on this subject will back me up on that as far as mastering a shotgun that can be very difficult even this winchester 1897 a very basic version of a pump shotgun has a lot more of a learning curve than you might think oh and the question as to why is this particular one my favorite for home defense I've got video my top five guns for home defense watch that and I explain it a little bit but anyway the idea that you're going to have difficulty mastering your shotgun because of the other types that are out there not if you just get one and stick with it and go with that and you heard what my colleagues had to say about that point so bottom line to the whole thing shotguns are not perfect and they are not for everyone or every situation but I think we've pretty clearly demonstrated that they don't suck for home defense so as always don't try this at home on what to call a professional and thanks for watching the shotguns don't suck video

Channel: undefined

Views: 824,752

Rating: 4.9626479 out of 5

Keywords: Shotguns, home defense, Shooting walls, Shooting through walls, Bullet Profing your house., Paul Harrell

Id: CiHHgjaR0TI

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2015