The Best Home Defense Shotguns

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So, what’s the ideal home defense weapon? That poor dead horse has been flogged to brisket ages ago. The reason that simple question sparks such ample discourse is that there is no obvious consensus. Everybody has an opinion. The possibilities fractionate down into several discrete categories. Each has its own merits and limitations. The options include handguns, rifles, carbines, and shotguns. Implicit within those categories are issues of caliber, magazine capacity, knockdown power—whatever that actually means—and portability. 

Handguns are the most common but likely the worst choice. Running a handgun well under stress and in dim light is an acquired skill. Most American shooters lack the means or the will to engage in realistic combat training with a pistol. There are analogs, but they’re neither convenient nor realistic. Additionally, from the perspective of a guy who has logged his time in an urban ER, pistols project just enough downrange horsepower to do the deed without a whole lot left over. 

You can certainly drop a dude with a handgun. That happens all the time. However, you have to be intentional about it. Ball ammo pokes tidy little holes. The good stuff makes tidy little holes whilst being way messier inside. Regardless, you need to be pretty particular about shot placement to stop a determined assailant expeditiously with a handgun.

Rifles pack plenty of power. However, they are potentially long, bulky, and heavy. They are also optimized for fairly long-range engagements. In a CQB (Close Quarters Battle) environment wherein you are defending your domicile from malevolent actors, much of that power might be wasted behind your target. A decent high-velocity rifle round can produce a truly fearsome wound. However, over-penetration is a legitimate concern. Additionally, depending upon the circumstances, a high-velocity rifle round can pass through something soft and gooey without yawing much prior to its departure. That’s one of the big reasons Uncle Sam has been griping about the downrange effectiveness of the 5.56mm round of late.

The ideal option is most likely a pistol-caliber submachine gun. These weapons are compact and maneuverable. They don’t have a great deal of range, but you’ll never take a righteous shot in America beyond across-the-room distances anyway. However, the bigotry of the uninitiated conspires to keep true full auto operation out of the hands of most Americans. Even if you do have a real-deal machinegun handy, good luck defending that in court. A semiauto pistol-caliber carbine sports the same fairly anemic ballistics as a conventional handgun in a more stable chassis. That leaves nature’s handheld howitzer, the shotgun.

Historical Precedent

On 26 October 1881, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp teamed up with a tuberculous dentist named John Henry “Doc” Holliday to face down a group of miscreants in a vacant lot off of Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona. The Bad Guys included Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. The shootout lasted half a minute. 

When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton along with both of the McLaury’s lay dead or dying. The sundry combatants had fired around thirty shots in total. Everyone was packing handguns. Doc also carried Virgil Earp’s double-barrel Meteor cut-down 10-gauge.

Holliday unlimbered his 10-bore on Tom McLaury from a range of about ten feet. These guns fired black powder rounds that were not quite as spunky as modern fare. However, they were still more than adequate to do the deed. McLaury was out of the fight immediately. He staggered backwards across the street and then collapsed at the base of a telegraph pole. 

Dr. Henry Matthews later reported that Tom McLaury's body sported twelve buckshot wounds from a single shotgun blast on the right side under his arm. The gaping four-inch entry wound was centered between the third and fifth ribs. McLaury was dead where he dropped.

Practical Tactical

My experience in the ER supports this. While handgun rounds make little holes and some rifle rounds are indeed truly horrible, nothing holds a candle to a shotgun. At tight ranges, even birdshot can be cataclysmic. A 12-gauge slug travels roughly as fast as a typical .44 magnum round yet is almost twice as massive. Buckshot will immediately take the fight out of anybody.

At intimate ranges, shotgun wounds make folks look like they were worked over with a giant ice cream scoop. I would say it is as bad as a horror movie, but I’ve never seen a horror movie that even came close. The down side is that a typical scattergun not firing slugs remains a fairly imprecise tool.

If using one of these hand howitzers for home defense, that is a serious consideration. Slugs offer rifle-like accuracy at fifty meters or less but suffer the same challenges of potential over penetration. Buckshot will stop an assailant faster than anything that doesn’t sport a tripod and an impact fuse, but it is easy to spill extraneous shot around the sides of a target. If there are friendlies cowering behind the sheetrock, this is a non-starter. However, in a permissive threat environment, a 12-gauge is as good as it is going to get. Presuming that is the case, let’s explore some options.

Basic Shotgun

This is the best time in all of human history to buy a shotgun. You can find reliable break-action, single-shot shotguns for less than a c-note online. These uber-simple weapons seem crude by modern standards, but they never, ever fail. They were adequate to feed our forebears through the Great Depression. They still work today.

The double-barrel versions are a bit more expensive, but they do offer two rounds on tap. No less a firearms luminary than Joe Biden suggested a double-barrel 12-bore for home defense. He actually opined that the ideal technique was to step out on your back porch and empty the gun harmlessly into the air. I’m not sure what his Secret Service detail would have thought about that. However, he was the President, so I’m sure he knows what he is talking about. 

Regardless, the same side-by-side design that killed Tom McLaury will reliably secure your home today. These guns can be had both with or without exposed hammers. With a little practice they are easy to manage, even in the dark.

Mid-Range Scattergun

America is covered in a thin patina of slide-action shotguns. Mossberg and Remington are the most prevalent, though inexpensive imports have made recent inroads. In the heady days before black rifles became popular with the cops, most every police cruiser in the country sported a slide-action Remington 870 12-gauge. 

These guns are endlessly customizable. Collapsible stocks of a bewildering array of flavors, barrel shrouds, optics solutions, and the like transform your granddad’s humble thunderstick into something altogether better. You can land an inexpensive import for substantially less than $200. Name-brand American fare isn’t terribly expensive new. Additionally, do a net recon for cop surplus guns, and you’ll find some great bargains. These weapons are typically carried a lot and shot a little. Regardless, it’s tough to tear these things up.

The down side is that a slide-action shotgun is one of the harder weapons to operate under stress. They’re awkward to reload in a hurry, and they invariably have some switches to learn. Additionally, while the action is innately quite reliable, I have had some functioning problems with this class of gun. Much of it can be traced back to operator error—short-stroking and the like—but these weapons can still be fickle. However, this can be mitigated with practice.

The Fancy Shotty

There has never been such a wide selection of autoloading shotguns available to American shooters. Remington and Mossberg offer time-tested versions. New Turkish-made imports mimic the Benelli M4, the Steyr AUG, the FN SCAR, the AR15, and the HK G3, all at stupid low prices. Some keyboard commandos have complained about their reliability and durability, but that has not been my experience. 

These recent imports are not designed to be run out of an armored personnel carrier in combat. When used as intended on the range or for home defense, they run reliably and well. That presupposes you feed them properly. Many tube-fed shotguns will run low-brass birdshot fine. Most of my mag-fed guns demand spunkier high-brass fare for truly reliable operation. You just have to tinker on the range to figure out your gun’s particular personality. However, most any autoloading shotgun will run reliably with high-brass slugs and buckshot. Revolutionary fare like the IWI TS12 look like something out of a Star Wars movie.

Taking Home Defense to the NFA Level

Can you hear it, way off in the distance? That’s the soft sound of rapidly approaching freedom. Thanks to an obscure inclusion in the recent Big Beautiful Bill, the National Firearms Act transfer tax for suppressors and short-barreled weapons will drop to zero effective 1 January 2026. We all rightfully wanted the entire regulatory scheme to go away, but this is better than nothing.

On New Year’s Day, we will be able to file a BATF Form 1 and cut the barrels on our shotguns down without having to bribe Uncle Sam for the privilege. The details are easy to find online. Like most government tripe, the process is a bit cumbersome but doable. Once you get the form back approved, the world is your oyster.

I have built several already. My Mad Max-style side-by-side 12-gauge handgun is a perennial crowd pleaser. Recoil is the stuff of nightmares with serious loads, but it is cool enough to land you dates with supermodels in the right circles. The slide-action Remington 870 makes a great host because the barrel mounting ring is already fairly far back. The Mossberg design is tougher to shorten.

The process is easy. I cut mine down using a cutoff wheel on a table saw. Put a little tape down on the table to protect the gun’s finish and take your time. I dressed the cut ends with a Dremel tool and then installed a new front sight with a drill press and hand tap. The purist might fret about pattern size with this unadorned muzzle. However, at the across-the-room ranges these guns are intended to be used, that really doesn’t make much difference. If that makes you itch, get a machine shop to thread the bore for interchangeable chokes.

Shotguns are immensely versatile, and the pending removal of the NFA transfer tax opens up some wild new opportunities. Under certain specific circumstances, a custom scattergun can be the ideal home defense weapon. Figuring out the details really is half the fun.

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