Weird Gun of the Day

I went over to Michael Bane’s blog to see what was going on, and I ended up at Shootinggallery.tv…whoops, no, Downrange.tv, where he has videos posted. One featured a very interesting newish gun: the Taurus Judge. This thing is a 5-shot revolver that will chamber .45 LC and .410 shotgun ammunition. And you can get it with a 3″ barrel. Costs about $500.

People always overestimate how much a shotgun pattern will spread. They don’t fling shot in all directions. Mr. Bane shoots the Judge at what appears to be 7 yards [further reading suggests it may have been more like 7 feet], and it turns out the pattern is the size of a human face. Which is not a coincidence. As I understand it, the beauty of this gun is that it’s harder to miss your assailant. The bad part? It’s not great at long ranges unless you use pistol ammunition. But as the Taurus rep in the video points out, explaining a long-range “defensive” shot to a non-Taurus-made judge could be hard.

Another benefit: a low risk of overpenetration. So you are less likely to shoot your neighbors. Unless that’s what you’re trying to do.

It’s an interesting idea. I don’t know if I agree that there is a great need for a spray-and-pray gun for bedroom distances. If you shoot well, you’re not going to miss at that range, and if you shoot badly–I judge from watching people who can’t hit a damn thing–increasing the hit zone to a diameter of seven inches isn’t going to help too awful much. A bad shooter can miss the target entirely at 7 yards. Mike and I shot the other day, and he told me the guy next to him actually scared him. He was a Miami kid who seemed to have an attitude, which would explain why he figured he didn’t need to be taught how to shoot. He shot so close to the frame, Mike was afraid he was going to catch a rebound.

Look cool, act tough, shoot like a girl. That mystifies me. All the tattoos in the world won’t clean up a mangled target, which is the only thing the other folks at the range will notice.

To get back to the Judge, the positives seem undeniable. It’s a legal sawed-off shotgun, it does more damage than a .357 or .45 ACP, and supposedly, it’s not all that loud. That’s a big plus in a closed space like a car or house.

I’m not in love with the idea of five shots between me and death. I would not want to shoot five times, find that an attacker was still a threat, and then have to break open a revolver and reload. And I feel sure that even if I shot with one hand, no aiming, I could hit a person ten feet away over 90% of the time with my 11-shot Glock. Also, if half of your pellets are in the perp’s face, where do the other half go? Nowhere bad, you hope.

It’s tough to figure out how to defend your house. An automatic shotgun with a laser would be great, but to get any kind of magazine capacity, you have to buy something weird. And the noise and flash would be pretty awful, unless you had a .410. A pistol can put 15-17 consecutive shots at your disposal, but most people can’t shoot, so does that really help?

Saiga makes a 12-gauge shotgun based on the AK-47, and that would be great, if they scaled it down to .410 and kept the big magazine. I have read the magazines go as big as 11 rounds. Unfortunately, they scaled it down and cut the magazine to four rounds. I fail to see the appeal.

I shoot primarily because I like to shoot. Even if the hippies managed to fix it so we couldn’t have guns to protect ourselves, I would still want to shoot, even if I had to go to a ridiculous club and check guns out of a locker. But self-defense is the primary purpose of guns, and I think about it.

I just heard from Mike. It looks like he’s finally going to make a choice. I think he’s getting a Dan Wesson Pointman 7. I feel like I’ve been at the hospital for a month, waiting for a baby to be born. I don’t care if he buys a gun that came in a box of Cracker Jacks. I just want him to buy something so I can go on with my life. And so I can shoot it.