Shotgun or pistol in your home: Which is better?

I say: Why not use both? 

Let’s look at what each does well and doesn’t do well. 

Pistols are handy to have on you and are good for moving about and performing other tasks where a free hand is needed,  such as opening open doors, leading other people to safety and/or holding a flashlight. But they’re kinda lacking in the firepower department compared to a long gun. 

 A shotgun or a rifle brings A LOT more firepower to the table that a handgun just can’t match, but unless you’ve got an Ithaca Auto & Burglar by your bedside, you’re going to need both hands to work the gun. An AR-15 makes a dandy home defensive firearm, but be warned: They are LOUD in enclosed spaces. If it’s legal to do so where you live, consider buying a suppressor, elsewise, some active hearing protection for you and your loved ones might not be a bad idea if you’re thinking about an AR-15 for home defense. 

I have a Mossberg 500 in my safe room loaded with #4 buckshot, and I have a pistol (usually one of my CCW guns) on or near me at all times. The shotgun is for defense of the safe room, and the pistol is there to move around the house if needed. On my shotgun, I have a shotshell holder with extra buckshot and a few slugs. I figure 13 rounds or so rounds of #4 buckshot*, a couple of slugs plus the content of my CCW pistol(s) will be enough to stop most threats outside of a rampaging bungalow or at least enough to hold them off until help arrives. 

I consider both a shotgun and a pistol to be integral parts of my home defense plan, much like I consider a fire extinguisher and a smoke alarm to be parts of my plan for a home fire. Each has its role to play in keeping me and my family safe. My primary plan is to get everyone to the safe rom ASAP and wait there with my shotgun until help arrives. If for some reason I need to move about my house, it’ll be with a pistol and a flashlight if it’s at night. I don’t want to go from room to room clearing my house: I’ll leave the professional tactical work to the professional tactical people. 

Recently however, I noticed a flaw in my thinking. In my safe room, I had the means to stop a threat, but I didn’t have the means to stop bleeding. The nearest first aid kit to my safe room was downstairs in the hall closet. 

Whoops. 

Now in my safe room, I have a first aid kit and a bunch of Israeli field dressings and copies of my driver’s licence and CCW permit for easy identification if (God Forbid) I needed them. I keep an old unused cell phone nearby as well, because any working cell phone can call 911, regardless of whether it’s on a current plan or not. 

I keep all this stuff in our safe room because I don’t want to clear my house, going from room to room with catlike stealth: I want to get my family to my safe room ASAP and keep them safe, healthy and secure until help arrives. 

So what’s your preference? Pistol, shotgun, rifle, or some combination of all three? 

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* Why #4 instead of 00 buck? I live in the suburbs, and over-penetration through thin drywall into other houses is definitely a concern of mine. 

Training Review: Combat Focus Shooting

I was fortunate enough to take a two-day Combat Focus Shooting class a few months ago, and I learned (and unlearned) a great deal.  The class is the first one I’ve taken that begins with the assumption you’ll start a potential gun fight on the wrong side of the power curve. You’ve been ambushed; you’ve either let someone near you who shouldn’t be, or something has happened (shooter, robbery, whatever) that you need to respond to. 

Read the whole review here.

Practice What You Can Practice

Time are tough right now. Unless you’re an LEO or in the military, finding ammo for practice and training is well nigh impossible. 9mm, .223, .40, you name it, it can’t be found. Here’s a few suggestions to help keep your firearm skills sharp while we weather this ammo drought.

Learn something new. 

I took a two-hour sporting clays class earlier this month and had a blast. I’ve never really had any instruction on wing-shooting, and those two short hours helped me bust more clays than I did before. Is it tactical? Probably not. Is it fun? Oh yeah. Next time I’ll use my Mossberg 930SPX, just to get in a little bit of loading practice and work on those popper/flying clay pigeon combo targets so common in 3 Gun. 

In a similar vein, why not take some time and get re-acquainted with your rifle? No, not the AR-15 that has enough stuff hanging off its rails to decorate a Hanukkah bush. I’m talking a RIFLE, a bolt-action or semi-auto gun in a major caliber (bigger than .223) that can reach out and touch someone beyond where your M4gery can reach. After all, you’ll want to find out that you need to update your rifle with new accessories or a new scope NOW and not when you really need to make the shot. Besides that, the slow pace of a precision rifle work means you won’t burn through your precious ammo supply at a fast rate, and you can find hunting calibers (.30-06, .243, 7mm, etc) right now, even if the more common calibers are all gone from the store shelves. 

Practice without ammo 

Sure, there’s dry fire practice, and dry fire practice can be very good for things like quick reloads and finding out where’s the best location for all your daily carry. Dry fire practice is also very good for getting rid of any latent tendency to jerk the trigger (and I let you know how good when I get rid of mine…), but caveat emptor: Repeating a mistake in dry fire over and over again means you’ll repeat that mistake over and over again with real ammo. 

Airsoft is another option for practicing without ammo. You can find gas or electric action airsoft guns that feel and work just like most common semi-automatic pistols and rifles, which means you can you practice with all those accessories you bought like holsters and mag pouches, but not have to wear ear protection while doing so. Again, it’s not the same as real ammo, but it sure beats sitting around waiting for your backordered .45 to show up. 

Those are just two suggestions: What else are YOU doing to get through this current ammo shortage? 

Drive (and live) Defensively

If you’ve never owned a gun, the thought of carrying one on your person for self-defense can seem a bit intimidating, because after all, you’re carrying something that can potentially kill other people. 

But driving a car also means you’re using a machine that can potentially kill other people, yet we do that all the time without much concern. The good news is, the same concepts that keep us safe while driving a lethal instrument like a car can also keep us safe when carrying a gun. 

Defensive driving is about trying to minimize the odds of hazards happening by anticipating the other drivers’ moves. It’s not about being paranoid or stocking up for the zombie apocalypse, it’s about being aware of what’s happening on the road around you. 

We do this on the road without thinking about it because we’ve practiced it for years. We’re not nervous about driving, we’re alert. We keep the music loud enough to enjoy, but quiet enough to hear an oncoming emergency vehicle. We keep our anger in check because we know that causes accidents, and we keep an eye out for people who aren’t as careful.

We are safer in our cars because we are situationally aware, and we are safer outside of our cars if we take that awareness with us when we leave our vehicles. 

“You have the rest of your life to solve your problems. How long you live depends on how well you do it.” 

– Clint Smith

Training with a .22

At last week’s IDPA match, it became abundantly clear that I needed some more practice

Because, quite frankly, I sucked. 

I’ve had trigger control problems for quite a while, and they’ve returned to haunt me due to a prolonged absence from shooting earlier this year. Controlling trigger jerk is easy in theory; keep a smooth press backwards from start to BANG, then smoothly let off until the trigger resets. 

That’s the theory. In reality, in middle of a shooting competition, things don’t always happen that way. Consider this simple IDPA stage from last week’s competition 

This is why muscle memory is so important. Because my brain was busy with sorting out the stage procedure, I had little to no bandwidth available for the basics of “aim, breathe, squeeze” required to make an accurate shot. Instead, I had to rely on my body knowing what was the right thing to do because I had repeated it over and over again in practice. 

Which brings me to .22 caliber pistols. 

 .22 is CHEAP. A box of 325 good-quality Federal .22LR rounds is under $20 at the local big-box store, which makes extended training sessions inexpensive and fun, and with the lower recoil of a .22, it’s easier to feel how your finger is moving on the trigger. 

I own a Smith and Wesson M22a with a red dot sight which is a great gun for isolating out trigger movement from the other actions of shooting a pistol. The trigger on it is… adequate. It’s about a 5 lb pull with a good reset, but the break is kind of non-existent, however, because it has a red dot scope on it, I can concentrate on the process of how my finger is moving on the trigger and leave the worry of sight alignment behind me. 

Here’s the results.

I set up this target at 10 yards and started out the practice session by shooting at the bottom right target and finished it by shooting at the top right target. You can see that as I concentrated more on how I was controlling the trigger, my groups improved until I was dropping them pretty much all inside the bullseye.

Total cost? 50 rounds of .22 and a hour of my time. 

This is why using a .22 for practice make so much sense. Unless you’re flinching or having other issues with recoil, a .22 lets you correct most common shooting problems without breaking the bank. 

Training for competition and safety

Continuing on from my earlier post, one of the pitfalls of competitive practical shooting is that it’s, well a competition, and not the real world. To quote from the article I linked previously,

“Many of these issues can be brought together under the single heading of stage strategy. To be good at the games, you need to understand their scoring systems and their rules. Sometimes things that make perfectly good sense ‘” like dropping an empty magazine on the ground ‘” could be illegal. Some things that make no sense whatsoever ‘” like exposing yourself to half a dozen targets at once instead of using available cover ‘” might be key to getting the best score. Most stages at most matches actually give you a chance to walk through and possibly even pantomime your plan in advance. Taking those opportunities and using them properly is important for the game, but obviously antithetical to preparing to respond to a sudden attack.”

If you’re going to need to defend your life with a firearm, the chances are pretty good you won’t have a chance to map out where you’re  going to reload your gun and where’s the best spot to shoot three targets without moving. Chances are it’ll be dark, chaotic and over quickly.

How do you train for that? How do you train to expect the unexpected and then react quickly enough to save your life?

“Blind” stages in competition are one way. Those are portions of a match where you aren’t allowed to walk through a stage, where you can’t figure out ahead of time where you’ll move and what you’ll be shooting when you get there. It’s just “Make ready, are you ready, standby, BEEEP!” and away you go.

This is a gamer’s worst nightmare, because all the little tweaks that you can do like figuring out angles of attack and optimal reloads don’t matter. What matters in a stage like this are the observation and orientation parts of the OODA loop, something that is off-loaded into “stage strategy” in a match but will be right up front in our face in the real world.

Why compete in practical pistol?

Owning a defensive firearm is good. Very good. Something to be encouraged and something to be taking seriously.

Practicing with your firearm is better, because owning a gun doesn’t mean you know how to shoot it well, much like owning a car with a manual transmission means you inherently know how to drive an stick-shift car.

Todd Green of PistolTraining.com is absolutely one of the best firearms trainers out there, and he comes down squarely in favor of augmenting training with competition because, well, we’ll let him say why.

“Another great thing about competition shooting is that it forces you to shoot someone else’s problem. Instead of just setting up drills you want to shoot, you have to deal with courses of fire you’ve never seen or perhaps even considered before. Not only does this push you to round out your skill set but it can show you where you’ve developed bad habits. My favorite example comes from IDPA: plenty of people practice shoving a magazine into their pocket as part of a ‘œtactical’ or ‘œretention’ reload but then discover in the middle of a match it’s not so easy if you’re kneeling or prone or otherwise in some position that makes accessing that pocket difficult. Getting the mag in can be difficult’¦ getting it back out if you need it can be impossible!”

Read the whole article over here, and then consider how regular training and competition can help you be a better shooter.

What is Team Gun Blogger.com?

 

• We are committed to getting the millions of new gun owners out to the range and encouraging their safe use of guns in competition, training and practice.
• We embrace “new media” because we are new media: We love guns and shooting so much, we write about them in our spare time.
• We are a group effort. We want to shorten the decision loop for new gun owners by giving them a variety of options to consider on one site, rather than forcing them to run all over the web looking for reviews and the basics of shooting.
• We write about what we shoot. We don’t try to come off as experts on guns or sports we know nothing about.
• We write about what it’s like to own a gun, not just briefly shoot 200 rounds through it and ship it back to the manufacturer.
• We believe that the practical shooting sports are an essential element of safely owning and carrying a personal defense firearm.

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