Quote:
Originally Posted by Borla
I always like when people argue over the internet, and one of their defenses is "you can't believe what you read on the internet". 
In reality, few home invasion responses require things that are covered in your main points. Having 20 rounds is great. Having a gun that is accurate enough for a one in a million shot is great. But the reality is that whatever you are most comfortable with, can be accessible, and is reliable enough to go boom when you pull the trigger the first time or two is the best thing for you. Most random burglars cut and run at the sight or sound of a gun. They are there for a few bucks, some drug money, or easy profit, they aren't there to get their head blown off.
By a huge ratio, most folks (especially those not living in bad areas) will never have their homes broken into when they are there. By an even huger ratio, most invaders won't stick around to be in a fire fight. If you want to war game your house and be tacticool, fine, but the chances are massively in the favor of that just being grown up make believe and/or a hobby to have fun with. |
In my extremely limited amount of shotgun experience (ie trap and skeet shooting for one day with a relative) I realized just how much of a pain in the ass doing
anything with the shotgun is.
The rate of fire is very slow (we are talking about pumps). Often times bad guys attack in teams. I want to be able to shoot multiple targets as quickly as possible and the cycling of the pump in general slows down how much you can shoot in a small amount of time. The skeet shooting really exemplified this. Shooting at two moving targets is hard enough, but then you throw in the additional task of pumping while keeping your sights on then next target and the complexity becomes much greater.
Additionally there's also the possibility of short stroking the pump. I did this a couple times throughout the day after fatigue was setting in. If the short stroking occurred in broad daylight under ideal circumstances, there's also the real possibility it could happen at 2am when someone breaks in and I'm groggy and in my hello kitty pajamas. Granted, I would be hopped up on adrenaline, but the short stroking could still be an issue.
Then of course there's the issue of reloading. The pump I used that day was the remington 870 and it was a pain in the ass getting passed the little trap door at the bottom and then of course you have to push the shell forward. Essentially the in the same amount of time it takes to load one round into the shotgun you could have loaded one entire magazine into a semi-auto handgun or rifle and gotten 15-30 more rounds instead of 1.
I was really close to getting a Mossberg 590A1 as my primary home defense system, let's face it: shotguns look cool and they make big holes. And I agree with you in that most burglars start running after the first shot is fired, but for me these were serious shortcomings of the shotgun system.