I’m going to steal an idea from Caleb Giddings. He’s described something he calls the Revolver Utility Curve. I’ve also heard it called the Revolver Horseshoe. He explains that revolvers offer major benefits for newer, less experienced shooters, fewer benefits for mid-level shooters, and then higher benefits again for higher skilled shooters. I’m going to adapt that concept to my favorite topic — shotguns — and present the Shotgun Utility Curve.
Like the revolver, the shotgun is often presented to beginners as a good defensive tool. It’s common enough that both Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle both have jokes about them. There is some truth to that, but there’s a lot more nuance that’s worth discussing.
There are a lot of different types of shotguns out there, and if there’s one thing that the gun community loves, it’s bringing up exceptions to broad statements and generalizations. I’m going to focus on traditional defensive shotguns that use tubular magazines and traditional layouts. We aren’t talking about Turkish abominations or bullpup super shotguns. Instead, we’re talking about the shotguns most people buy for home defense.
The utility curve has three main points. At the top of one side of the curve, we have low-skilled or beginner shooters and the high utility of a shotgun. In the middle, we have mid-skill shooters and relatively low utility. Finally, on the right side of the horseshoe, we have high skill and once again, high utility.
Low Skill, High Utility
One of the best aspects of a shotgun is that you don’t need to master many skills to succeed in most defensive encounters. It can be as simple as point and shoot. There’s one general skill involved: get the gun on target quickly and pull the trigger.
A new gun owner can practice ready-up drills at short range, focus on that one drill over and over, and likely do just fine in a home defense encounter. When firing buckshot, you’re throwing a devastating amount of ammo from the gun with each trigger pull. Every round fired is a Bill Drill+ and you can do it in under a second.
The multitude of pellets gives you two main benefits. First, all else being equal, more lead on target is better than less. If placed in the upper thoracic region, we have eight to nine chances for a pellet to hit something vital.
The front bead sight offers dead-simple indexing without the alignment penalty of pistol irons or the 2.5-inch height-over-bore offset of an AR optic at five yards.
It’s just plain simple to aim and shoot. For someone who doesn’t get into guns for any other reason besides defending their home, that’s a huge benefit.
Simple Logistics
Shotguns with attached tubular magazines mean you don’t really have to worry about your magazine. An unskilled shooter doesn’t have to go searching for a magazine that works with their gun. That’s an easy thing for most people reading this, but many folks out there don’t realize that different guns take different magazines, and that there isn’t a universal rifle or pistol magazine.
Seriously, ask anyone who works behind a gun store counter how many people come looking for a ‘9mm clip’ without any other information.
When you’re looking for ammo, you can pretty much get away with any 00 buckshot you find. A basic 00 load from Walmart will work just fine. Sure, a defensive, reduced recoil load is better, but loading up with the WallyWorld cheap stuff won’t keep you from winning a fight.
And you don’t have to worry about bullet weight or projectile design beyond buying something that says ‘OO Buckshot’ on the box and shoving it into the gun.
Mid Skill, Lower Utility
As your skills grow, you start to understand the shotgun’s downsides. Recoil can be hard to handle if you have to fire multiple shots. Engaging multiple targets quickly and efficiently with a shotgun can be difficult without a lot of practice.
Reloading efficiently takes a lot of practice to build your skills, and even more to maintain. Pushing shells into a tube will always be slower than swapping a magazine. Magazine-fed shotguns exist, but they come with their own challenges.
Shotguns differ widely in control placement. Maybe you started out with something simple like a Mossberg Maverick and now want to upgrade to a semi-auto. The differences will be significant and will require a good bit of retraining. Most modern rifles and semi-auto handguns are remarkably similar, so it’s easy to transition between them.
Logistics get even more complicated when you decide to add optics and lights to your gun. Shotgun makers are big fans of different optics mounting patterns. Adding a light is always a challenge because mounting lights on shotguns is a pain in the ass. This is especially true with pump guns.
Every time you switch buckshot brands, your pattern changes, and it’s annoying when your pet load disappears from store shelves. Using a specific gun and load combination, locks you into a particular platform.
I can train with one AR and M193 and grab nearly any other AR and any other company’s M193 ammo and get darn close to the same result. I can’t really do that with shotguns.
Shotguns are also heavy and fairly bulky. They’re harder to manipulate, especially if you want to avoid the NFA (well, until recently). Moving through a home can feel awfully difficult with a shotgun compared to a pistol or rifle. Braced large-format pistols are highly maneuverable and can fire rifle rounds.
As you advance to more complex actions and training, the shotgun starts to feel more like an anchor than the other options. An 11.5-inch AR in 5.56 can look awfully appealing at this point.
When you’re trying to learn to use cover, do target transitions, master positions, and all that fun stuff, the shotgun feels brutal. Ammo’s expensive, good training is hard to find, and your shoulder is tired of being bruised. Meanwhile, the AR is staring at you like a temptress, promising it can be so much better.
High Skill, Higher Utility
Finally, we arrive on the right side of the shotgun utility curve. A skilled shooter can really unlock a shotgun’s potential. If you’ve gone to the dark side rifle for a while, some of those same `skills can follow you back to the shotgun.
Target transitions, using cover, moving and shooting, keeping the gun in your “workspace,” managing ammo, and properly using a red dot are all useful skills to bring back to the shotgun. Doing all that with a rifle is great because it’s less stress on your body, your wallet, and your targets. What doesn’t follow over is the AR’s light recoil.
Don’t worry, though, the shotgun’s heavier recoil is something you can manage with ammo and good technique.
A highly skilled shotgun shooter learns a lot about the gun, but also a lot about the ammo. That WallyWorld buckshot at 1,600 FPS punishes the shoulder, but if you spend time studying shotgun ammunition options, you learn two wonderful words: Reduced Recoil.
This isn’t just about sparing your shoulder; it’s about increasing performance. Less recoil lets you fire faster follow-up shots and transition targets.
Recoil mitigation becomes second nature. When you aim, your firing arm pulls rearward, and your support arm pushes forward. It’s just what you do. You learn to swap targets during the gun’s recoil impulse and can fly through multiple target engagements. Pair good recoil management with low-recoil buckshot and the shotgun feels downright domesticated.
As a beginner, all you know the shotgun throws multiple pellets. As a skilled shooter, you know what your gun and ammo can do at various ranges.
It Keeps Getting Better
Skill, knowledge, and ammo selection help you understand your gun’s pattern. This gives you near-predictive performance. You know what the pattern will look like at a given distance, so you don’t have to guess where those pellets will land.
At the same time, you’re retaining the shotgun’s ability to put multiple effective projectiles on target per trigger pull. You’re dispensing Bill Drills with every pull of the trigger.
Reloading gets quicker and you start to realize you’ll almost never need to reload a modern defensive shotgun in a civilian context. Still, you’ve gotten the Valhalla drill down to under ten seconds. You start to see the tube more like a gas tank and reloading as topping off between road trips.
You’ve even mastered the slug-select drill, letting you expand your range and punch through barriers, though it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to.
Close quarters work becomes much simpler once you learn to short-stock the gun and navigate tight spaces while keeping it up and ready. Short-stocking becomes much easier once you learn recoil control.
It takes time, pain, and some cash to figure out how to accessorize the gun with a light, optic, and more. But once you reach a high skill level, you’ve figured out how to make it all work for you.
That’s when the shotgun stops feeling like an anchor and starts feeling like a tool you can exploit.
The Shotgun Utility Curve
Shotguns, like revolvers, work well for both low-skill and high-skill shooters. In a home defense context, the shotgun is a remarkably effective and simple weapon. It’s not the friendliest gun, but like everything else, you can overcome that problem with time, training, and practice.
A beginner benefits from the shotgun’s simple logistics and capability. The intermediate shooter recognizes the shotgun’s problems and starts to get sick of dealing with them. The skilled shooter keeps the utility while developing skills to manage the limitations.
Many people get stuck in that middle ground and never push past it to reach the true utility of a defensive shotgun. I get why; if you asked me which gun you should use for home defense, I’d tell you a short AR. I might even say it’s not worth the time to reach a high enough level of skill with a shotgun.
However, if you insisted on the shotgun, you’d learn why it’s such a fantastic platform for home defense. It’s tough to beat the ability to fire multiple projectiles per trigger pull, as long as you’re willing to learn the ins and outs of the gun.
Beginners benefit from what the shotgun does naturally, but skilled users benefit from what they’ve learned to make it do.
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