Hi all, I am sorry for the delay in responding to this thread and I don't mean to resurrect its mostly dead state, but, since I was able to put together a test case, it seemed reasonable to put it forward.
I was reading the large number of comments about the shotgun being too unwieldy to be effective in home defense. Since I instruct with a firearms school in LA, I decided it was reasonable to test. So, I hijacked a student during today's class and at the break, I threw a shotgun at him. The student is not big (~5'8", 130-140lbs) and had no experience with rifles or shotguns. I gave him 5 minutes of training on safety, operation and general technique and let him run the course. His practice consisted of 2-3 dry operations of the shotgun so he would understand the mechanisms. The course was one close (4') and one slightly distant (10') opponent. He performed this course, twice each, with a pistol and a shotgun. I took video and posted it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZvhcYj-ek My conclusions are as follows from this 1 anecdotal example. - 12 gauge recoil 00 Buck on winchester low recoil law enforcement ammunition is manageable even by those that have never shot a shotgun before. The student didn't drop the shotgun. it didn't jump wildly about. - acceptable accuracy with a rifle/shotgun is much easier to accomplish than with a handgun. Even his point shooting was dead on. In contrast, his pistol shots were in both in the lung on the distant target. I would not bet that these pistol shots would instantly take down an opponent and this is from a person that has trained ~5 hours with a pistol. With 5 minutes instruction he shot it as I would in a close contact situation and was dead on. His 1st run though the course was low on the distal target and dead on in the 2nd run. - the big downside seems to be the pumping mechanism. I considered him to be remarkably slow in operating the shotgun. With 30' of practice I could get him pumping with the recoil and his speed would probably be similar to his handgun work with more lethal results. - This exercise really reaffirmed that the pistol really is a remarkably difficult to master weapon. With 5 hours of training, he was somewhat lethal with a pistol -- I tried to build up the stress during the exercise, his pistol shots were drifting pretty badly as a result. If you believe in shot placement, I would not want to rely on this skill level under the stress of a "real" engagement. In contrast, the shotgun was dependably operated (although slightly slowly) with this level of stress and SIGNIFICANTLY less training. All for what it's worth for 1 test case example... But, I thought it would be fun to test. Jonathan _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Firearmsregprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
