The Home Defense Shotgun Skills Test

hey everybody i am chris baker from luckygunner.com and it has been far too long since i have done a video about shotguns so today i have got a shotgun skills test for you to try out at the range it is designed with a home defense context in mind i am going to go ahead and just dive right into the course of fire and then i will come back and break down each stage with a more detailed explanation to shoot the test you will need a shotgun and a shot timer for ammo you will need 11 rounds of buckshot you could shoot it with slugs if you really want but it is designed with buckshot in mind for a target you can either use a uspsa or idpa cardboard silhouette you have a hundred points to start all your pellets need to land inside the down one or the c zone for every pellet in the down three or d zone you will subtract three points from your score you will need a score of 75 or higher to pass if any pellets miss the target completely or if you go over the par time on any stage that is an automatic fail in case you want to make the test more challenging i've got some intermediate and advanced par times for each stage that i will put up on the screen i have shot this test a handful of times so far and i have not yet made any of the advanced times so i know they are possible but you're gonna have to be pretty quick okay here we go stage one at 15 yards start at a low ready position on the signal fire one round the basic part time is two seconds stage two at ten yards start at a low ready position on the signal fire two rounds basic part time is three seconds stage three at five yards start with the gun loaded in a cruiser ready condition the chamber should be empty with three rounds in the magazine tube place the gun on a table beside or in front of the shooter at the signal pick up the gun chamber around and fire three shots at the target perform an emergency reload with two rounds and fire those two rounds at the target basic part time for this stage is 16 seconds stage four at three yards start at a low ready position using a modified compressed firing position on the signal fire two rounds at the body of the target then take one step back while transitioning to a normal shoulder mounted stance and fire one round at the head basic part time is four seconds i've spent a lot of time trying to find shotgun qualification courses or skills tests that are relevant for defense inside a home or a business unfortunately most of the tests out there come from law enforcement qualifications they tend to include stages that really don't have anything to do with home defense most of us don't need to test our ability to like transition to a handgun or to shoot slugs at extended ranges so i pieced together my own shotgun test using modified pieces of other tests i tried to emphasize skills that are most relevant for private citizens like safe and quick gun manipulation shot accountability and mounting the gun these are some of the skills emphasized most by the defensive shotgun instructors that i know and they're also some of the skills i have seen lacking the most in people who don't have much training or experience with shotguns let's take a closer look at the first two stages the focus is on mounting the gun quickly and shot accountability it's really not that difficult to hit the target at 15 yards with a shotgun but it's a little more challenging to get all your pellets on target we are accountable for every pellet that leaves the gun missing is not acceptable so you need to pattern your shotgun with the buckshot you have for home defense make sure that pattern is not too wide a tighter pattern gives you a bigger margin of error so that if the hit is not quite dead center all of your pellets are still going to go on the target and not out off into the unknown the longest range in most homes is a lot less than 15 yards but if you can keep all the pellets on target at 15 then you can definitely do it at 10 yards or 5 yards or whatever you have to work with on my first run of the test i used my beretta 1301 with some double lot buck that really doesn't pattern all that well i kept all my pellets on the silhouette but just barely i know that some of the premium self-defense buckshot is tough to get right now you might have to use just whatever you can find just make sure you know what kind of spread you're gonna get with that load at various ranges for stage two we have two shots instead of just one shot that is to let us evaluate recoil control and if you're running a pump shotgun your ability to cycle the action efficiently okay on to stage three this one could probably be a test all on its own there's a lot going on here this stage actually comes from an old fbi shotgun qual with one major change starting on the table in a cruiser ready condition is something i borrowed from tom givens range master test the target is at five yards so you really shouldn't have any problem with accuracy that is because this stage is all about manipulations it includes loading mounting running the action and an emergency reload we add time pressure and a round count that you actually have to keep mental track of and it becomes a really good test of whether or not you have achieved a level of unconscious competence with your shotgun handling skills for the starting position you can stage your shotgun really in whatever ready condition you normally use in your home i recommend a cruiser ready condition there are different variations of what that means but essentially it means that you have rounds in the mag tube but the chamber is empty there are some other nuances that i discussed in a video last year if you want some more details about why i do it that way i want to emphasize here this is a skills test it is not a scenario it's not supposed to be a simulation of a real life encounter or anything like that the idea of this part of the stage is just to evaluate your ability to get the gun from a ready condition to putting rounds on target with some time pressure for the reload portion you don't have to necessarily have your shells on a side saddle or other shell carrier on your gun if you want they can just be in your pocket or you can have them sitting on the table a gun mounted shell carrier is probably a good idea but they're really not as essential as i think we would like to believe conflicts where someone's got a shotgun loaded with buckshot or slugs almost never involve more than two or three shells fired i put a reload stage in this test not because reloading is a super useful skill on its own but because working on reloads is a great way to become intimately familiar with how your shotgun works if you're good at reloading the shotgun you're probably also competent and confident with all of the other necessary manipulations stage 4 is based on an old lapd swat team qual basically it's a failure drill two to the body one to the head but this time we fire the body shots from a compressed position like that and then we take a step back and get a normal shoulder mount for the head shot if we are in tight quarters or if the target is super close we don't want to stick the gun all the way out there but then if the space were to open up then we need to be able to smoothly transition back to a shoulder mount the technique i'm using in the demo is called short stocking i did a video on it a couple of years ago if you want to know more about that you could use an underarm type of position if you prefer that is actually what the original lapd test called for back in the 90s however you do it the idea is just to reduce the amount of gun that you have sticking out in front of you now you might think of this as a more obscure shotgun skill and not something that should be included in a core skills test i actually think it's pretty important to know how to do and it's really not that difficult to figure out if i had to go check out a bump in the night i would much rather move around my house with a handgun than with a shotgun the shotgun works best as a bunker in place weapon but even if we intend to use it that way there is no guarantee we won't ever have to move around with the shotgun so between furniture and doorways and other obstacles sometimes a shoulder mount could be counterproductive so we want to shorten it up a little bit if we can if you are using a bullpup style shotgun this is your one moment to shine a compressed position is not as necessary with those guns you also might not even be able to actually do the short stocking technique anyway depending on how that gun is set up so for this stage you can just fire all three rounds with the shotgun shouldered as normal for a stockless shotgun like a mossberg shockwave you still need to use a compressed position for those first two shots you don't want the gun out here like this like a lot of us use them i think the best way to run these guns is the technique pioneered by rhett newmayer from demonstrated concepts he gets a cheek weld with the pistol grip it's a nice compressed position that gives you a really fast sight picture he sells a recoil strap that makes this technique a whole lot easier you could use that cheek weld position for the whole test including all of stage four here are my best results on the test so far i know that some of you can probably beat those times so give it a try at the range and let me know how you do if you need some ammo for your shotgun of course you can get it from us with lightning fast shipping at luckygunner.com

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 51,195

Rating: 4.9626269 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ILCD4bWCvnc

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mrbroadsideofabarn]

Besides Chris being long winded

Not a bad test, I kinda skipped around and didn’t catch the times but the actual skills seem pretty normal

Snap shot, reloads, load and go’s. The compressed ready step back I don’t know maybe incorporate more than just a step back