Y'all boys ought to see what a load of 12 gauge birdshot does to a man's belly at range of 15 feet. There is a fallacy about shotguns, that the shot spread is so wide, that you don't even need to aim.
Of course most of y'all know this is not true, at inside-the-house range. At 15 feet, you get a hole about 1 1/4 inches in diameter. We called it a "rat hole" as the edges were all ragged, it looked like a hole that had been chewed by rats.
I worked 14 of these cases. One was not inside the house, it was two brothers, out hunting, had a .410, one brother was crossing a barbed wire fence, trigger got hung in the fence and hit his 14 year old brother in the neck, range 10 feet. Number 8 shot. Dead right there.
The other cases were inside the house.
Down in the South, most everybody keeps a loaded shotgun behind the door, loaded with bird shot. Might be a crow, or a squirrel, in the garden. Might be an owl is perching on the telephone wire at night, trying to eat your pet kittens. And, a gun might be needed for household defense.
So, black or white they all have a loaded shotgun nearby, loaded with bird shot, usually #8. I must say only one or two of my cases involved a break in, most of them were father vs. son, or girlfriend vs. boyfriend. It is 10 pm, the two people are drunk, an argument starts, and somebody grabs the shotgun and fires a shot.
Never saw somebody shot twice, never saw buckshot used. I would imagine that whatever #8 shot would do, buckshot would do even better.
At any rate, these 13 cases of inside-the-house shotgun injuries, most of the patients were Dead Right There. Some of them, we got them alive to the ER, but they never made it to ICU. I worked over 200 GSW in my career, I saw people hit with a .357 magnum, I saw a guy get his leg blown off with a 7mm mag, [he lived], but the close range shotgun was the deadliest weapon I ever saw.
We had one case that I thought would break my record. This guy was shot in the adjacent county, which was really backwards and had even a smaller ER than mine did. This pt. was a giant, 6 foot 4 black guy, worked 12 hours a day cutting pulpwood. This guy was about 225, solid muscle and about 27 years old. Looked like he was ready to play for the Falcons.
See, a young healty pt. is harder to kill, than an old sick patient.
So this guy was shot in the adjacent county, and their EMS had brought him to our county. And my little hospital couldn't handle him, so we were transferring him to the big city of Macon Ga. I was attending. The guy had been shot 12 hours earlier. His girlfriend gave him a load of #8s in the belly from 12 gauge, right in the living room range 10 feet.
When we went to pick him up in ICU, he was conscious and alert, to my astonishment. I had never seen anybody survive such a wound for over 30 minutes.
We took him over to the Medical Center of Macon, I was talking to him the whole way, guy sounded like a blues song, "Damn I wish that girl hadn't shot me..." Apparently she thought he had another girlfriend.
I thought for sure this guy would break my record. I called the Medical Center the next morning, the guy died the night before at midnight from kidney failure.
So, if you want the result of the break in at your house to be a dead bad guy, shoot him in the torso with a shotgun.
