Steel Birdshot for Home Defense

[Music] hi we're out on the range today so please bear with gunfire here in the background and today once again we're talking about birdshot in your home defense shotgun why a while ago we did a presentation on birdshot in your home defense shotgun and that led to questions about extra heavy loaded turkey magnums in your home defense shotgun so we did a presentation on that and that led to a lot of questions about steel birdshot in your home defense shotgun so here we are and the first topic of discussion is why would you even use steel shot well traditionally birdshot is made of lead and there's some good reasons for that lead is soft and easy to work with and easy to form into Spears being soft as the lead goes down the barrel it won't cause it any damage due to friction lead is very dense therefore heavy and it retains energy and it just makes a good anti bird projectile so why would you use steel shot well the concept is that there are some places where a lot of people have hunted a lot of waterfowl for a long time and a lot of lead shot ends up sinking to the bottom of whatever body of water and people become concerned that all that lead is going to get into the ecosystem so in some places laws have been passed requiring the use of steel shot or other types of non lead projectile in the state that I live in if you're going to hunt waterfowl lead shot is prohibited and most of time people are using steel shot so wood steel shot be a good choice in your home defense shotgun or even more relevant if you are primarily a bird hunter and steel shot is what you happen to have is it a viable option in your home defense shotgun well I've got my Mossberg maverick 88 20 gauge and my Mossberg 500 12-gauge and a couple of different types of steel shot and lead shot let's shoot it and see what we can learn in comparing lead and steel shot we have to discuss pellet counter now this is Remington 20 gauge 2 and 3/4 inch one ounce of number four led birdshot this is Winchester 20 gauge three-inch 7/8 ounce of number four steel birdshot both of them are number four pellets but because steel is lighter than LED you're going to get a higher pellet count even though it's 1/8 ounce less overall in fact enough more it requires a 3-inch shell as opposed to a 2 and 3/4 so what is the pellet con well it's not going to be exact from one shell to the next I cut two of the Remington's apart one had 132 pellets the other 127 but when I cut two of the Winchester's apart one has 152 pellets the other 161 so even though you have one eight thousand less of charge you have twenty or thirty pellets more and that's not bad but how will these two compare in terms of velocity let's go to the chronograph normally I set up the chronograph at 7 yards but when I'm using a shotgun and multi projectile rounds I like to shoot at four yards so let's start with our Mossberg maverick 88 20 gauge and our Remington ammunition 12 35 12:02 1221 1189 and 1209 now let's see how that compares to the Winchester and now let's try our Winchester 20 gauge 3-inch steel shot 1387 1476 1477 1460 and 1434 now let's try some 12-gauge ammo for 12-gauge I have Remington 12-gauge two and three-quarter inch one and one quarter ounce of number four led birdshot and Remington 12-gauge two and three quarter inch one and 1/8 thousands of number four steel birdshot I cut two of these apart and got 159 and 160 four pellets cut two of these apart got 218 and 226 pellets so with an 8000 East LLL have about sixty cutlets more now let's take these to the coronagraph so now I've got my Mossberg 500 12-gauge and we'll start with the lead shot [Applause] 1292 1263 1282 1293 and 1263 let's see how that compares to the steel and now the steel shaft [Applause] 13:54 1316 1288 1335 1325 and 1358 now let's go crunch the numbers well I crunch the numbers and here they are now with our 12 gauge lead shot got a mean velocity of 12 78 you may have also noticed that I fired six shots instead of only five with that ammunition one of those with the velocity of 12 88 was so much less than the rest that I kept that out of the computations to come up with our mean now with our steel shot we got a mean velocity of 1337 so when comparing lead to steel we have projectiles of the same size but with steel a higher projectile count and an extra fifty nine feet per second more velocity so it looks like going to steel as a plus this becomes profound when we look at our 20 gauge results with the lead shot we've got a mean velocity of 1211 and with the steel 1446 so again projectiles of the same size but with steel a higher pellet count and 235 feet per second more velocity that's a lot more however we are comparing 2 and 3/4 inch to 3 inch an unison and the reason I'm doing that is because of my local stores I could not find any 20 gauge 2 and 3/4 inch with steel shot but it's a common misconception that when you go from 2 and 3/4 to three-inch that you've gained a lot of velocity quite often the opposite is true a good example is 12-gauge 2 and 3/4 inch double ought buck 9 pellet versus 12-gauge three-inch but 15 pellet a lot more pellets but significantly less velocity but seeing the results with our steel off-camera cronograph some Winchester 12-gauge three-inch one in 1/8 ounce steel bb's now as we're number four birdshot is about 13 caliber bb's are about 17 caliber they're significantly bigger but we lose a lot of pellet count instead of with our number four shot having 218 or 226 pellets I'm counting eighty-three pellets in these steel BB shells but they also had a very impressive velocity at 1450 one so you put all this together and it looks like if your home defense firearm is a shotgun and if you choose to load with birdshot it looks like steel is the way to go but as always these are just numbers on paper how will they translate into effectiveness on the intended target let's see if we can demonstrate that and the way we'll test the effectiveness of our ammunition is with the meet target now for those who haven't seen it before the meet target is leather jacket skin followed by pork steak pectoral pork ribs a bag of grapefruit to simulate lung tissue more pork ribs on the back four layers of t-shirt on the front four layers on the back and the whole thing followed by the new and improved high tech police bullet stop and I'll shoot from seven yards with our Winchester 20 gauge three-inch 7/8 ounce of number four steel birdshot [Applause] well I've gotta meet target taken apart and with that shotgun at seven yards the pattern was only about two and a half inches in diameter and you can see the damage it did to our pork steak pectoral as far as our ribs on the front of the target a lot of damage there too now because the pattern didn't spread out very much it concentrated most in fellas on only a couple of the grapefruit and chewed them up pretty well now as far as penetration some of the pellets were stopped by the ribs on the front of the target some are all through the grapefruit but the great majority of them were stopped by the ribs on the back of the target no penetration occurred they're just laying on those ribs so looking at this I'd have to say our 20 gauge steel shot looks fairly effective now let's compare that to 12-gauge so now we'll try a Mossberg 500 in our Remington 12-gauge two in three quarter inch one and 1/8 ounce number four steel birdshot well I've got the meat target taken apart and I can sum up the results in two words very disappointing the gun I'm using has an improved cylinder bore barrel and at this distance the patterns usually fairly small with this particular ammunition the pattern was a lot larger and the pellets were spread evenly throughout the entire target and the great majority of those pellets were stopped by the ribs on the front of the target the only damage that was incurred by our grapefruit lung tissue was around the edges where the grapefruit wasn't completely covered by the ribs none of the pellets made it through the ribs on the back of the target and the damage overall was minimal so this tells us that not all steel shot is created equal and any time you switch shot you need to pattern your shotgun now let's try the three-inch magnum 12-gauge and now our Winchester 12-gauge three-inch one and 1/8 ounce of Steel bb's [Applause] now with the steel bb's again we see that the pattern opened up quite a bit the ribs on the front of the target have impacts from the top to the bottom but in this case the great majority of the BBS went clear through the ribs on the front of the target almost every one of our grapefruit is perforated most of them by several projectiles and the ribs on the back of the target have a lot of holes in them a lot of the pellets were stopped by the ribs on the back of the target but a lot went clear through so this looks like it would absolutely be lethal well we've seen the effect of steel shot on the meat target but how does that compare to lead shot I've demonstrated this on several previous occasions but at the risk of being redundant I'll demonstrate it again today I've got my Mossberg 500 loaded with Remington 12-gauge 2 and 3/4 inch one and one quarter ounce of number four lead birdshot let's see what this does [Applause] well the first thing I notice about our lead birdshot is that it held a much tighter pattern than the steel shot did it did a lot of damage to our pork chop pectoral put a really nice big hole through the ribs on the front of the target we did a lot of damage to our grapefruit lung tissue and the majority of the pellets were stopped by the ribs on the back of the target there's one more point I want to make about steel shot and my Remington Model 11 will help me make the point but first side note I used this firearm recently in a presentation where I described it as blowback operated and people were eager to tell me that I'd use that term incorrectly now autoloaders can function in many different ways including gas operated recoil long recoil blowback operated and a lot of people will use the term blowback generically to describe Auto loaders that are not gas operated in the same way that you can buy coca-cola pepsi-cola RC Cola Shasta Cola and some people will just say coke to describe the entire genre I used the term generically and I shouldn't have actually this gun is long recoil operator at least according to the sources I read but to get back to the point because steel shot is lighter than ledge there are some people who have can earns that it won't function correctly in autoloading shotguns while I half my Remington Model 11 loaded with Remington 12-gauge two and three-quarter inch one and 1/8 ounce of number four steel birdshot let's see how it works works just fine and steel shot has operated just fine in any Auto loading shotgun I've ever used so the take away from all of this today well if you choose to have a home defense firearm and you choose for that firearm to be a shotgun some people will based on their over penetration concerns or perhaps their local laws choose to load that shotgun with birdshot and as we've seen today with the right ammunition choices and at home defense distances birdshot can be very effective but what about steel birdshot well I wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of it and I'd say it's better than nothing but based on my experience with steel birdshot in the field and the results of today's demonstration steel shot would not be my choice so as always don't try this at home what you call a professional and thanks for watching the steel birdshot in your home defense shotgun video [Music] you

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 154,274

Rating: 4.9770608 out of 5

Keywords: paul harrell, paul harrell home defense, paul harrell home defense shotgun, paul harrell shotgun, home defense shotgun, home defense, shotgun, steel birdshot home defense, steel birdshot shotgun

Id: HF5N5tfMuX4

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

There are chokes for steel shot. Anyone know if that's to help with patterning, or just durability?