wrote in message
news
On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 22:16:21 -0400, "Robert Green"
wrote:
The shot spread from an SBS is extreme. You couldn't kill someone
20 feet away without a lot of luck.
That is not true at all.
Well, for one I meant to write 20 yards. My bad.
"Generally, the column of buckshot leaving an unmodifed shorter barreled
shotgun will stay together for a little past one yard, after which it tends
to spread approximately one inch per yard. This means that most shotguns
have trouble keeping all the pellets of a standard nine-pellet 00 buck load
on a stationary, police silhouette target, faced squarely, past 15 yards."
Source:
http://www.spw-duf.info/longgun.html
My 20" cylinder bore pump gun is not a whole lot tighter than when I
put a piece of 3/4" pipe about 8" long on a single shot receiver and
patterened it. At 20 feet one patterns at about 6" and the other at
8". It is certainly not "spray the room".
So, you're confessing to making an illegal SBS on a public form like the
gent who built the robotic sentry? (-:
The main lure in a SBS is concealability.
Even a cut down coach gun is a pretty big and bulky item. I'd have to agree
with Mr. Devlin on this - the main lure is that a shotgun is cheap to
acquire and easy to cut down. But study after study shows that when they
have a choice, crims go for large caliber handguns with large magazine
capacities.
Ironically that is the only way you can carry a gun in Florida (with a
firearms permit) , concealed.
If I spent the $200 and passed the background check I could carry a
SBS. I prefer my Ruger KP90 if I think I need a gun with me.
That is not very often.
Which is exactly the point. A hell of a lot of modern pistols are so much
more lethal than SBS's that it seems pretty silly to care about them to the
point of putting someone in jail or deep jeopardy for owning one. As I am
sure you know, the larger the spread, the lower the mortality. At one end,
with a tight choke, you can deliver a tight group of pellets that will sever
arteries and blow brains out. Even small amounts of spreading turn that
mass of pellets into a spread that is not likely to do lethal damage. You'd
almost never choose an SBS as a personal defense weapon (or even as a
criminal weapon) if you've got an automatic pistol with a large capacity
magazine and a caliber of 9mm or greater. The case could be made that an
SBS is safer than a modern pistol with FMJ bullets because there's far less
chance of over-penetration and killing or injuring someone in the
background.
http://firearmsid.com/A_distshotpatt.htm
Has a photograph indicating exactly how a little spread adds up to a serious
reduction in lethality.
http://firearmsid.com/jpgs/shotvic.jpg
Once the pellets leave a tight cluster, they are increasingly subject to
slowing from air resistance. When pellets are no longer following in the
slipstream of the large mass of shot, they slow down considerably. So even
a little spreading greatly reduces the overall impact on the target. As the
photo shows, you go from a bone breaking, artery severing blow to a mass of
pellets that don't penetrate very deeply.
http://www.firearmsid.com/Feature%20...in%20Crime.htm
The site above has some interesting stats on the "real world" use of SBS's
in crimes, and it's clear that criminals very much prefer large caliber,
well made pistols to SBS's. The FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports show
that in 1993 57% of all murders were committed with handguns, 3% with
rifles, 5% with shotguns, and 5% with firearms where the type was unknown.
I suspect that's not because regulation has been so effective, it's because
(as the stats in the above site make clear) crims want the best "horsepower"
that they can steal in a concealable weapon. That's not an SBS. Maybe the
SBS was the concealable "king" 80 years ago when John Dillinger was alive,
but it's certainly not now.
--
Bobby G.