While I think it is hard to beat the effectiveness of 8 or 9 00 shotgun pellets hitting center mass at close range I see this comparison passed around the internet a lot and find it to be very inaccurate.
I’d personally much rather be hit by a single 53gr .33” 00 buckshot pellet than a 115-147gr .356” bullet that with the right ammo can expand to .5” to .7”.
And we all know that according to our clueless commander in chief that a 9mm will blow a persons lungs clean out of their body:/ Buckshot would likely only blow out a few small chunks of lung.
I haven’t tried these. I’ve shot some other Winchester target loads without problem but tried some Winchester Walmart special loads that did have some issues. They were made noticeably cheaper than the other Winchester stuff I tried even though they were in similar looking boxes. Some of the shells were not round enough to fit in the chamber without being forced in but I was able to eventually get all of them to fire. When I got home to look up reviews there were lots of other people having all sorts of issues with more than a few not being able to get half the shells to fire in there shotguns.
I have mostly been using cheap federal target shells without any problems.
For HD which realistically 2 room distances I choose 00. At 40-50 feet if you have aimed the shotgun regardless of choke all 8 or 9 pellets will be absorbed by a human sized target.
That probably depends on the shotgun, choke, and buckshot combo as well as how well you aim and how little the target is moving. The worst patterning buckshot I have personally tested had over a 12 inch wide spread at 30 feet and would only stay inside a human sized target at 60 feet if you aimed perfectly a few inches below the bottom of the sternum, they kept their arms down by their side and they didn’t move while you were were pulling the trigger. I doubt it would be all that much tighter at 50 feet.
This is my experience with cheap Super X Winchester through a 18 1/2 inch cylinder bore barrel with my 12 gauge. 50 feet and 9 holes consistently. Granted the target was static. This was to verify the pattern at extended distance.
In my house (mostly plaster and lathe) and 2 shooting “lanes” of 20 feet and at room distance as primary engagement possibilities, I am very confident that even 2 or 3 pellets not making contact would lodge harmlessly in an interior wall and would never make it through an exterior wall. However with the extended distance results I would be very pi$$ed if I were to be patching holes in walls in a worst case scenario.
I am not a shot gun expert by any stretch of the imagination but have been getting a little more into them lately. I have had a couple of discussion with some very experienced shotgun folks who say they actually prefer using slugs because buckshot can easily go through several layers of dry wall and tends to deflect off of 2x4s and then go in very unpredictable directions through that drywall and even exterior walls. With a slug they know which direction it will keep going in so they just need to make sure there is nothing important in that direction for a quite a ways.
Given the proximity to neighbors in a couple of directions around our home I believe buckshot is a better option than slugs for most scenarios but I would still prefer to do my best to make sure all the pellets hit what I am aiming at. This is why my shotgun is loaded with Federal Flight Control 8 pellet 00 buckshot. Even at 30 yards it has a reasonably tight pattern with no flyers. At 10 yards it makes a super tight pattern about 2 inches around from my shotgun. I feel very confident that I can make all the pellets count at that distance.
Though my shotgun would not be the first thing I would reach for in a self defense situation as I find a pistol or semi auto rifle to be better options for defending our home for a variety of reasons.