{"id":1204,"date":"2008-06-02T18:03:24","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T18:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/74.220.207.152\/~hogonice\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2008-06-02T18:03:24","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T18:03:24","slug":"judge-not-lest-ye-be-charged-with-manslaughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/?p=1204","title":{"rendered":"Judge not, Lest ye be Charged With Manslaughter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Weird Gun of the Day<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I went over to <a href='http:\/\/michaelbane.blogspot.com\/2006\/07\/taurus-pt-1911-range-report-up.html'target='_blank'>Michael Bane&#8217;s blog<\/a> to see what was going on, and I ended up at Shootinggallery.tv&#8230;whoops, no, <a href='http:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/player.htm'target='_blank'>Downrange.tv,<\/a> 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&#8243; barrel. Costs about $500.<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"taurus%20judge.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hogonice.com\/Pixes\/taurus%20judge.jpg\" width=\"480\" height=\"294\" border='2'><\/center><\/p>\n<p>People always overestimate how much a shotgun pattern will spread. They don&#8217;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&#8217;s harder to miss your assailant. The bad part? It&#8217;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 &#8220;defensive&#8221; shot to a non-Taurus-made judge could be hard.<\/p>\n<p>Another benefit: a low risk of overpenetration. So you are less likely to shoot your neighbors. Unless that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re trying to do.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting idea. I don&#8217;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&#8217;re not going to miss at that range, and if you shoot badly&#8211;I judge from watching people who can&#8217;t hit a damn thing&#8211;increasing the hit zone to a diameter of seven inches isn&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Look cool, act tough, shoot like a girl. That mystifies me. All the tattoos in the world won&#8217;t clean up a mangled target, which is the only thing the other folks at the range will notice.<\/p>\n<p>To get back to the Judge, the positives seem undeniable. It&#8217;s a legal sawed-off shotgun, it does more damage than a .357 or .45 ACP, and supposedly, it&#8217;s not all that loud. That&#8217;s a big plus in a closed space like a car or house.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;s face, where do the other half go? Nowhere bad, you hope.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;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&#8217;t shoot, so does that really help?<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I shoot primarily because I like to shoot. Even if the hippies managed to fix it so we couldn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I just heard from Mike. It looks like he&#8217;s finally going to make a choice. I think he&#8217;s getting a Dan Wesson Pointman 7. I feel like I&#8217;ve been at the hospital for a month, waiting for a baby to be born. I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Weird Gun of the Day I went over to Michael Bane&#8217;s blog to see what was going on, and I ended up at Shootinggallery.tv&#8230;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guns-hunting-fishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}