Beretta Blog

With the rapidly growing interest in shotguns for home defense, tactical use, and 3-Gun competition, buckshot loads are back in the spotlight and in demand! Until these trends took over, interest in buckshot was waning. Few states still allow bucks (actually deer of either sex, for that matter) to be taken with buckshot. Even in those that do, rifled slugs and slugs fired from rifled shotgun barrels, muzzleloaders, and rifles – even handguns – provide more practical and efficient tools to cleanly harvest deer under modern hunting conditions.

If you carry a defensive firearm or compete in practical pistol, you know consistent practice is the key to confidence and skill-building. We all need to practice more often, so we dry-fire at home to improve our skills without the time and expense of going to a range. Dry-fire is effective, and it’s something I do it on an almost daily basis, but at some point, the rubber has to meet the road and we need to put our plans into action and send rounds downrange. 

Two of the characteristics you look for in a home defense shotgun are simplicity and speed. Should you ever need the gun to perform its primary duty, you need it fast, and you need it easy.

The simplest possible sight for a shotgun is what most of them already wear – a single bead out on the end of the barrel. This is a fine choice – make that, the best choice – for wingshooting, which is more about instinct than it is precision. However, acquiring and honing the necessary skills for “instinctive” style shooting requires a great deal of training. For example, you need to drill and drill and drill on mounting the gun into the same position every single time.

When the International Defensive Pistol Association launched their Compact Carry Pistol division, I thought it was a great idea. Lots of people shot IDPA matches with guns that weren’t really designed for concealed carry even though the sport was created for real-world carry guns. There’s nothing wrong with shooting a single-stack pistol with a huge magazine well in IDPA because, after all, it is a game; however, the CCP and Backup Gun divisions make a little more sense if the goal is to shoot actual carry guns.

When loading a fresh magazine or changing to a new one, there are two ways to “recharge” a semi-automatic pistol. You can push down on the slide lock lever using your firing or support hand thumb, or you can go through a partial slide racking motion. Some on the internet will insist that choosing the wrong method will get you killed and result in Justin Bieber lip-synching Milli Vanilli songs at your funeral.

Choosing a shotgun as the “tool of final resort” to defend yourself, your family, and home can be a wise decision. A light, short-barreled shotgun has a lot going for it as a defense weapon. We’ve looked at the pros and cons versus a handgun, and there are many reasons the shotgun can come out on top.

However, there’s one big question that must be answered: How are you going to store that shotgun securely and safely yet keep it accessible in a fraction of a second should you need it?

There’s a great deal of debate when it comes to creating and training for a home defense plan. The decisions you make and the tools you select will come down to what you personally believe you’re trying to accomplish.

Do you believe the best plan is to silently “retreat, retreat, retreat” and hide in hopes either the authorities will arrive or the bad guys will leave on their own before they find your hiding spot? Or are you of the mind to aggressively confront and repel the intruders … shooting if necessary in the process? Or is it your goal to more passively repel them – scare them off – hopefully, without a shot being fired?

The instructor of the course I attended to acquire my first Minnesota Permit to Carry was a goofball. The six-plus hours of classroom instruction were heavy on his tales of bounty hunting adventure and his personal political and religious views. They were vapidly light on meaningful content. Though this was nearly a decade ago, and I have attended much better “thinking man’s” carry training since, one piece of good advice from “GI Joe” still rings loud in my head:

“There is nothing worth killing for that isn’t worth dying for.”

Without pictures, it didn’t happen. Unless you bring back a t-shirt, you didn’t go. And without skill and progress measurement, you can’t improve.

One way to exercise your skills and measure your progress is to practice with a structured course of fire. A good routine will “walk you through” a variety of skills like strong hand only, support hand only, two-handed shooting, draws from a holster, and magazine changes. While the shooting community has developed hundreds of such practice scenarios, you don’t have to look any farther than your local law enforcement agency to find one. While every agency differs in the details, most have a structured qualification course of fire that every officer has to complete on a regular basis.

With many things in life, I deliver better results with aggressive time limitations. There’s nothing like a tight deadline to make me focus and produce. Unfortunately, shooting isn’t one of those activities. In fact, adding a time crunch to basic shooting tasks has the opposite effect of degrading performance, sometimes to near comical levels.