When deciding on a home defense solution, many new shooters take the ill-informed, but well-meaning advice of armchair commandos, gun salesman and their uncle Bob. Which is to say, buying a pump-action shotgun and if confronted with an intruder, simple rack the action to scare them away. This is not only very bad advice, it’s also extremely dangerous and relies on the assumption that an attacker will be logical.
Many criminals and especially home-invaders, are hopped up on some form of chemical stimulant or opiate and their brains aren’t firing on all cylinders. They’re angry, aggressive and oftentimes so drugged up they can’t feel pain or fear. In this scenario, nothing short of a well-placed bullet will stop them.
And one of the most reliable ways to place that bullet where it needs to go, is firing it from a compact, lightweight, light-recoiling carbine.
Accuracy
While the majority of home defense shooting occur inside of five yards, that doesn’t mean a shooter doesn’t need an accurate firearm. While five yards may seem like too close for a shooter to miss, look at police shootouts at similar distances where dozens of rounds are exchanged, yet only a handful find their mark.
This is because most of these shootouts involve handguns. Handguns are great for home defense because they allow shooters to keep a hand free to operating lights, opening doors, or escorting loved ones out of harm’s way. The biggest problem with pistols, is that they’re difficult to accurately shoot without training and often have limited ammunition reserves.
The former is because shooters only have two points of contact with their pistol at most. This makes stabilizing the pistol both for accurate shots, and controlling the recoil of subsequent ones, more difficult than with a shoulder-fired firearm.
By picking a pistol caliber carbine, shooters benefit from increased stability and recoil control – the latter of which makes follow-up shots a breeze compared to traditional handguns. After all, pistol caliber carbines, by definition, are chambered in rounds designed to fired one-handed. The felt recoil impulse on something in 9mm like a SIG MPX, or CZ Scorpion EVO, is much more manageable than the recoil of a standard handgun, a 12-guage shotgun of any variety or even a 5.56mm carbine.
Which brings me to another advantage of these soft-shooting lead-slingers: cost of proficiency.
Cheap Proficiency
This section’s title might raise an eyebrow or two given the high cost of ammunition, but like Einstein’s theory of time, it’s all relative.
Many people like to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliners’, where he suggests it takes 10,000 hours of practice to functionally master a skillset. While that may be true, few gun owners have the money or time to invest that much in shooting.
The good news, is that it only takes a fraction of that time to become proficient at any skillset. While I personally believe deliberate practice trumps rote learning, different methods work for different people.
Regardless of whether you spend 10,000 hours of 50 practicing with your chosen home defense firearm, pistol caliber carbines reduce that cost tremendously.
For example, look at the standard 30-round magazine used by the CZ-USA Scorpion EVO, the magazine itself is pretty inexpensive. More than that, filling said magazine with 9mm ammo is magnitudes less expensive than firing the same amount of ammo through a pump-action shotgun.
It also tends to take less repetitions to master for new shooters, since the recoil impulse is much less than centerfire rifles or 12-guage shotguns. And don’t forget about the volume of the shot itself, which brings me to our next section.
Suppressor-friendly
With the exception of calibers designed specifically for suppressors like .300 blackout, pistol calibers are literally, exponentially quieter than their rifle-caliber counterparts.
Our military’s standard round, 5.56x45mm, fires a very small, very light bullet at incredible speed. This high velocity is what makes the round effective against two-legged predators and enemy soldiers. The only problem with this, is that the round’s super-sonic velocity makes even suppressed guns very loud. Not, damage-your-hearing loud, but certainly unpleasant, especially indoors.
Pistol caliber carbines on the other hand, can be borderline movie quiet when equipped with a quality sound suppressor. This is because most common pistol calibers can be loaded in subsonic varieties without negating their effective terminal ballistics.
So if you’re running a 9mm SIG MPX carbine with its 20-round magazine filled with 147gr subsonic hollow-points, and a nice sound suppressor like the GemTech GM9 from SilencerShop, indoor gunshots won’t damage you, or your loved one’s hearing.
This may seem like the last thing on a homeowner’s mind when they hear a window shatter at 3am, but it’s important because you never know if that intruder was alone or not. Firing an unsuppressed shotgun or rifle will destroy your hearing entirely for a few hours. Deaf, and possibly blind from a bright muzzle flash in a dark house, it would be very easy for another attacker to sneak up on you. Plus, who is going to take the time when they’re scared half to death, to put on a pair of ear muffs or plugs?
Shared Ammunition (and sometimes magazines)
Very few handguns are chambered in full-powered rifle cartridges. The only one I can think of off hand, is the Ruger New model Blackhawk in .30 carbine. But truthfully, .30 carbine is hardly considered a full-powered round, and the Blackhawk is single-action only – making this six-gun a poor choice for home defense.
That said, plenty of carbines are chambered in common pistol rounds, so shooters can swap ammunition between guns or just simplify the logistics of purchasing ammunition. Some pistol caliber carbines like the Kel-Tec Sub 2000, or Beretta’s PX-4 Storm even use pistol magazines. So a shooter could keep a backup on their hip, and a carbine at the ready. If either firearm malfunctions, they can take the magazine out of one, and insert it in the other.
This can also be handy if your spouse also has a firearm for home defense. It allows the two of you to swap magazines and ammunition. While handy, it’s likely you’ll never need this capability. Still, gun-owners don’t tend to be the sort of people to take unnecessary risks. Which might be why they own a gun in the first place.
Regardless of which caliber, firearm or ammunition you choose – be sure to thoroughly test your chosen setup before employing it for home defense use. The best time to make sure a gun functions fine with a certain brand of ammo, isn’t during a firefight.