Well I keep a short barreled shotgun at my bedside loaded with 3 inch magnum number 4 turkey loads and a very open choke. I know that we all like to believe ourselves a bad @$$ that would remain cool as a cucumber in a home invasion shootout. But in reality I'm betting that virtually everyone would be scared as hell. A circumstance that just might make precise aiming difficult especially if they are shooting back. A shotgun pattern that opens up a bit provides a little margin for less than perfect aim under duress. Yet at the same time will probably not be lethal to anyone on the other side of a wall.

What do loads like this do to people on the same side of the wall as you however? I work as a RN at a hospital. I see the people who come into our ER with gunshot wounds all the time. Those shot at inside house ranges with loads like I mention above are by far the worst gunshot wounds we see. And the survival rate of any solid torso hit is almost nil. Why? Because that swarm of hundreds of pellets don't miss anything within about a 6 inch circle. A single slug from a handgun may pass within 1/8 of an inch of a major artery or organ and do no damage to it at all. But anything the center mass of that shotgun load of 4's or 5's pass close to is getting clipped. A head shot is instant death. A upper torso hit is a instant stop followed by rapid death. A lower torso gut hit is an instant stopper and they will likely not survive long enough to get to a operating table. An arm or leg hit? Color it gone with a virtual certainty of severing the major arteries, veins, and breaking the bone inside it. This isn't speculation on my part, I see these wounds in our ER. We have people come in and survive handgun wounds all the time. Most shot at close range anywhere in the torso with 4's or 5's from a shotgun arrive at our door DOA.

We had two guys come in by ambulance one night after a shootout. AK 47 vs 9mm handgun. One had shot the other 6 times and he had been shot 4 times himself. All wounds were in the chest and abdomen. They were both awake and talking in the ER although one did died later in ICU. But in all my time as a nurse I have never heard a police report of what a victim or perpetrator did or continued to do "after" he was hit in the chest by a shotgun at inside house ranges. It's a fight stopper folks.