Shotgun House Gun

My shotgun is a Remington Model 11 12 gauge. It’s semi-automatic and holds 5 in the tube (or is it 4 in the tube and one in the pipe?...) It has walnut furniture and I have 2 barrels for it, (well 3, one is a munged up home gunsmith attempt to make a regular barrel a rifles barrel. Yikes.) a long and a short. It doesn’t have a sling swivel, or a place to mount a light or a ghost ring sight. The short barrel doesn’t have even have a front bead. It isn’t tactical.

It would ostensibly be a house gun, to ward off prowlers and single zombies. If I left it out of the safe.

Now I could leave it out of the safe. Lacking a front bead is no handicap, but the gun will shoot high if you point it with the barrel. Lacking a light is little handicap, I have excellent night vision and more importantly I can navigate my own home with my eyes closed. It will do.

A mounted light and a ghost ring sight and a tritium front sight and a sling would all be good things. Even an improved stock (it was Carteach’s review of a shotgun stock that inspire me to write this.) would be nice.

But it’s not critical. The critical thing is YOU, of course, but you always have you. The second most critical thing is a functioning reliable firearm.

So I could take the shotgun out of the safe and leave it in a corner. I’d probably load the tube with buckshot with none in the pipe, necessitating a working of the ‘bolt’ to get it running in an emergency, but this status is inconsequential to availability. Why don’t I? Because I don’t shoot the shotgun enough is the biggest reason. Thus it isn’t a known quantity on reliability. It’s not like my revolvers. In fact, when hunting, it didn’t eject its spent shell. My semi-auto became a bolt operated model. The revolver doesn’t cease to function like that. Sure the cold was a factor while hunting, compared to the summer skeet shooting, and not enough grease on the tube probably is the reason for failure, and now that has been corrected… But I haven’t gone skeet shooting with it since hunting...

If I did shoot a buncha skeet/trap, and over a period of time, I might use the shotty as more of a ready weapon in the home. So why consider it for self defense if it is a safe queen? Well it’s just not a 3AM wake-up-OH-CRAP!!!-gun. 3PM-drug-gang-riot-spilling-out-of-the-high-school-and-now-banging-on-my-door-gun it is.

For Zombie I go with a rifle.