Home Protection – Rifles or Shotguns?

Two weeks ago, we discussed whether or not a firearm should be a part of your preparedness efforts.  Last week, we discussed choosing your first firearm.  This week officer Caleb Cleek is going to discuss rifles and shotguns.

While the average pistol is very portable, it is lacking in power compared to a rifle or shotgun.  If portability isn’t your number one priority for your firearm, you may want to consider a rifle or shotgun.

Portability or Power?

Rifles come in a plethora of calibers and styles and have two major benefits over pistols.  As already mentioned, they fire more powerful cartridges than pistols.  A rifle bullet travels two to three times as fast as a pistol bullet.  The reason this matters to you as a shooter is the bullets have more kinetic energy when they reach their target, which equates to more knockdown power.  If you are forced to shoot somebody, it is more likely to stop him dead in his tracks upon impact and end the fight.

My dad has been a trauma surgeon for 40 years and has cared for many gunshot victims. Over the years, I recall two separate incidents when he came home from work and reported a police officer had been shot and killed after the officer had shot the suspect.  In both cases the officer was shooting a 9mm pistol.  While both officers also killed the suspect, the bullets they were firing didn’t have the power to knock the bad guys down and end the fight instantly.  Both bad guys had enough life left in them to get rounds off and hit the officer after they had received what would shortly prove to be fatal shots themselves.  Most rifle rounds have enough kinetic energy to knock a person flat when he is hit.  In a fight for your life, this is a huge benefit.

Range  

The second benefit is range.  A competent pistol shooter will be able to hit a man-sized target somewhat regularly at 100 yards.  A competent rifle shooter will be able to hit that same sized target out to 300 yards; add a scope to the rifle and he should be able to hit the same target out to 500 or 600 yards without much trouble.  In a self-defense situation, the range isn’t as much of a factor as it is hard to justify that a person 300 yards away, or even 100 yards away, constituting a serious threat to your life.

Potential Detriments of Rifles or Shotguns

On the other hand, a rifle’s extra power can also be considered a detriment in home defense.  A pistol bullet will pass through walls in your house and can hit people in adjacent rooms you may not be aware of.  This is important to keep in mind if you have kids who may be sleeping in a different bedroom.  A rifle bullet will pass through the walls in your house and then the walls in your neighbor’s house and possibly into their neighbor’s house.

There is a lot of opportunity for collateral damage with a rifle.  One possible solution is to use a smaller caliber rifle with varmint bullets.  They are designed for hunting fur animals and fragment when they hit their target.  This prevents the bullet from passing through the animal and putting a second hole in the pelt as it exits the far side.  These frangible bullets greatly reduce the over penetration that occurs with a bullet that remains in one piece and maintains its mass and kinetic energy.

Types of Rifles

The three common rifle actions are lever, bolt and semi-automatic.

Lever Action

Those of you who are John Wayne fans should be familiar with the lever action rifle.   John Wayne’s Winchester 30-30 is the quintessential lever action rifle. It is quick to reload and has proven itself reliable for well over 100 years.  Even with its track record, it has gone the way of the revolver and is not a popular type of rifle with most people.  Just the same, the lever action is not a bad choice for home defense as the action allows the shooter to reload in a natural motion of moving the hand down and back up while keeping his eyes on the sights and target beyond.

Bolt Action

The next type of rifle action is the bolt action.  This type of rifle is reloaded by moving a handle up and pulling it back, which removes the spent cartridge, and then pushing it forward again to load a new cartridge.  If you have watched a sniper movie, you have probably seen a bolt action rifle in use.  They tend to be very accurate and are normally accompanied by a scope.  These rifles are great for long range shooting.  They are not ideally suited for a home defense situation because of the time and relatively complex motion needed to load a new bullet into the chamber after each shot.

Semi-Auto

Last, but certainly not least, is the semi-automatic action.  A semi-automatic rifle will fire a bullet every time the trigger is pulled.  The shooter doesn’t have to do anything to load another cartridge; the gun does it automatically.

 Home Defense  

For home defense situations, I don’t believe there is a better rifle than the AR-15.  It is the civilian equivalent of the M-16, which has been the military’s main battle rifle since the Vietnam War.  The difference between the M-16 and the AR-15 is the trigger must be pulled each time the AR-15 is fired as opposed to the M-16 which can fire multiple shots with one trigger pull.  The advantages to the AR-15 are its power, its low recoil, and its ability to fire multiple rounds quickly.  Unfortunately the AR-15 has been vilified in the media recently, but don’t let that dissuade you.

AR-15 Caliber

The .223 is the standard AR-15 caliber, but the AR-15 can be purchased in a myriad of different calibers.  It is a modular firearm, so you can purchase a different barrel and upper receiver and change your AR-15 to a different caliber by simply removing two pins.  It doesn’t even require tools.  Aside from the aforementioned problem of over-penetration, the AR-15 is an excellent choice to add to your prepper list.

The AR-15 gives you the ability to present a very formidable defense in the event you are forced to protect yourself and your family from assailants, the ammunition for a .223 is readily available, it is cheap compared to other rifle cartridges, and the cartridges are small so a person can easily carry a lot of bullets without a lot of extra weight.  Most police cars in the country are equipped with an AR-15.  If it is good enough for them, it is certainly good enough for me.

Long Rifle

Finally, I would be remiss in my discussion of rifles if I neglected to mention the .22 long rifle or .22lr.  It is a very small cartridge and doesn’t have a lot of knockdown power, but it will certainly stop a threat if needed to do so.  The other benefit is the ammunition is very cheap, somewhere around $30 dollars for a “brick,” which is a rectangular box containing 500 cartridges.  Because of the small cartridge size, a person can easily carry 1000 rounds in a backpack if his plans required him to leave his house and travel to a different location.

A .22lr is a great addition for a new shooter.  The round is virtually recoil free.  Because ammunition is so cheap compared to other calibers, a new shooter can get a lot of practice to hone his skills without spending a lot of money.  Every major gun maker also sells pistols in .22lr, which means you can have the same ammunition for your rifle and pistol.  Ruger makes an excellent rifle, the Ruger 10/22, which I would highly recommend if a .22lr is in your future.  I have had mine for 25 years and shot thousands and thousands of rounds through it and it still functions great.  Because of its lack of knockdown power, a .22lr would not be my primary firearm for self-defense, but it would certainly be a great backup.

Home Defense with a Shotgun

When it comes to home defense, the shotgun is probably the best all around choice.  Unlike a pistol or rifle, which fire one bullet at a time, a shotgun shell is full of small BBs.  Depending on a number of factors, these BBs spread out at varying rates, but the “pattern” or spread of BBs covers a much bigger swath than a single bullet. This means that when you are literally scared for your life, and your heart is thumping like drums at a rock concert, your aim doesn’t have to be perfect to hit your target.

The knockdown power of a shotgun is tremendous.  If you shoot a man in your house with a shotgun, it will probably bowl him over like he was hit by a bull.  It prevents him from getting a shot off at you in return.  The other huge benefit is with small shot, you don’t have to worry about shooting through walls as you do with a pistol or rifle.  A shotgun blast will probably pass through a wall, but you don’t have to worry about the BBs going through every wall in your house and then into your neighbor’s house.

The downside to a shotgun is, unless you are shooting slugs (or one single bullet), a shotgun has an effective range of somewhere around 50 yards, give or take depending on the ammunition you are shooting.  Past that, the pattern is so spread out, your chance of hitting your target greatly decreases. For purposes of home defense, however, this range is more than sufficient.

Basic Actions of a Shotgun

Break Action

Shotguns come in 3 basic actions.  The first is the break-action; the most common type of break action is the double barrel, although they also come in single barrel.  Again if you are a fan of cowboy movies, you have seen these in use when the stagecoach is being attacked by bandits and the stagecoach driver opens fire with his double barrel shotgun.  As the name suggests, the double-barrel shotgun has two barrels.  One trigger pull fires one barrel, the second pull fires the other barrel.  Then you have to reload.

Semi-Automatic

The second type of shotgun is the semi-automatic.  As with a pistol and rifle, a semi-automatic shotgun automatically feeds another shell into the gun after you shoot.  All you have to do is pull the trigger until you are out of ammunition.  I worked at a charity skeet shoot a while back and was amazed at how many of the people shooting semi-automatic shotguns had malfunctions. Based on what I saw with the issues those people were having, I prefer to use a pump-action shotgun for home defense.

Pump Action

The pump is the third type of shotgun action.  One of the most recognized and feared sounds in our culture is the click-click of a pump-action shotgun being loaded.  I suspect in many cases that universally understood sound alone is enough to send an intruder running for his life.  The pump-action shotgun is loaded by moving the fore-end, or the part your forward hand grips, backward and then pushing it forward again in a “pumping” action.

A Shotgun’s Choke

Unlike rifles and pistols, shotguns have a device called a choke at the end of the barrel.  The purpose of a choke is to squeeze the BBs together to help slow the spread of the BBs.  For a home defense shotgun, I would recommend an open choke.  This means the barrel doesn’t constrict at the end and allows the BBs to spread out faster.  At the distances you will be shooting in the event you are forced to shoot somebody in your home, you will want the BB’s to spread out as fast as possible to make sure you hit your target.  The other consideration is the length of the barrel.  In-home defense situations, shorter is better.  You don’t want a long barrel protruding past corners to announce your arrival or to give the intruder something to grab onto and disarm you.

Common Shotguns

If you look in most any police car in the country, you will likely find a Remington 870 shotgun in the gun lock.  They are relatively cheap in comparison to other shotguns and have a reputation for reliability.  Like the Glock and AR-15, if the police trust their lives to a Remington 870, it probably isn’t a bad choice.  The Remington 870 comes in a variety of offerings.  Choose one with a magazine capacity of at least 4 rounds.

In closing this series of articles, if you choose to purchase a firearm, and I hope you do, don’t buy it and forget about it.  Get trained in its safe and proper use.  Once you are trained and competent, get out and use it.   Shooting is a very perishable skill and a little practice will keep your newly acquired ability honed razor sharp.  Make it a family outing and have fun!

Caleb Cleek is the husband of one wife, the father of four children, a ten-year law enforcement veteran in the once-great state of California, and author of the apocalyptic Infected book series, which is for sale on Amazon in paperback and Kindle ebook.  Did I mention he really likes guns?

What About You?

What words of wisdom do you have for someone just getting started with guns for preparedness purposes.  Share it with us in the comments so that we can all become better prepared.

Together lets Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome

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