Personally I don't own a shotgun. But still believe that's the best firearm in general for most people protecting their home. Reasoning is you don't have to be super accurate, just point in general area and your good.
@RandomHero , this is perhaps one of the biggest fallacies/urban myths of the shotgun. Especially if you're going to procure one for home-defense, you'll want to take heed of
10mmLife's words, which I think are worth reiterating:
A lot of people believe a shotgun with 00 buck is a super spread device that will clear an entire room with one shot but the reality is the shot group of a shotgun will be relatively small when used in a home defense situation because of the lack of distance to spread the shot anymore then a baseball size group.
^ To give you a solid visual of this ------>
hickok45
....and his follow-up video:
^ Look at how tight those pellets group,
RandomHero.
And again, this,
Mr Guns N Gear:
^ Here, pay special attention to how the difference in the chosen load/cartridge can make.
Any way you cut it, that's not a "general-direction" weapon: not at typical across-the-room/down-the-hall distances in the average American home, at least.
It's very, very, very possible to miss, without aiming.
The real stopping power comes from firing 9 00-buck pellets in 1 shot with the projectiles being .33 caliber slightly smaller then a 9mm bullet but all impacting the target at the same time in a compact area.
And this,
RandomHero is really where the lethality of the shotgun comes into play. As you've now seen from the videos above, with the shot patterning so close together, that's a tremendous amount of damage, and it drastically increases the odds of effecting a true physiologic stop on the threat which it impacts. It's just like
10mmLife noted above: it's like shooting that threat 8 to 9 times with the typical 9mm handgun.
This is also actually why for defensive/duty use, wads which help keep the pellets together - like Federal's FliteControl - are so popular: it helps keep that shot all together for a longer distance, which helps mitigate the risk to the backdrop (i.e. bystanders).
Here is a video which I think I may have cited before on this Forum, where John Correia of Active Self Protection examines a police shooting incident in which the officer used the shotgun in a "surgical" manner to eliminate the threat, while he was still in close proximity to an innocent:
To effectively be able to use the shotgun in self-defense or duty service, one must know how the gun patterns with one's chosen ammo, and know also at what point a slug change-over will be necessary to effect precision shots.
This is exemplified in the response I'd posted earlier in this thread to
Peglegjoe -
https://www.thearmorylife.com/forum...2-gauge-ammo-for-home-defense.597/#post-11114
Hope this helps to bring the shotgun into better perspective!