No not towards you.
The SSS carries just two in the tube, and based on 870 and 500 designs, is therefore, not, drop safe.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I considered doing a Serbu clone, but the upright grip bothered me. Just don't like the look nor the feel of such grips at all. And the tube capacity of just 2 seemed a bit silly. I wanted to be able to fire 1 or 2 shots without worrying too much about running out of ammunition. 4 was a consideration, but then I'd need a full-size backpack to keep it from sticking out and alarming other hikers, and a full-size backpack would be excessive and frankly silly for day hikes. So I settled on 3, with cutting down the magazine tube and re-threading it, to exactly match the MCS forend.
Seems to me that Paul does a fairly effective job of covering the merits of #4 buckshot with this video from 2018:
A possible summary: #4 has enough power, but not a lot of range before pattern entropy means you're likely to miss or wound beyond maybe 25 yards. And for HD use, 25 yards ought to be plenty. If you're needing to take a defensive shot further than that you probably ought to be running for the safe and grabbing a carbine or hunting rifle, or loading a slug in a known-accurate shotgun. Overall he seems to favour 00 buckshot over #4 for increasing effective range slightly.
Adding into this the notion of using a short barrel - anything between 8" and 14" - and it seems likely you lose another 30% of effective range with buckshot owing to slightly greater spread. This will vary from gun to gun and shell to shell, but I'm making what seems a safe generalization.
In this video from 3 years earlier, Paul goes into a demonstration of wall penetration.
In this one he compares .223" to 12ga with 00 buckshot. The .223" will hit your kids in their beds or maybe even your neighbours, even though the bullets start tumbling right away. Buckshot does about the same level of damage after going through a couple of walls including exterior siding. The 9 pellets of buckshot will hit your kids or your neighbours in more places at one time.
Then he gets into #4 buckshot, low recoil loads. And presto, after 2 interior walls the pellets were stopped by the external wall. So it seems his question is somewhat resolved, at least with lower recoil type #4.
If a bad guy were to show up in my bedroom doorway, my kid is asleep about 6 to 8 feet behind him. There's a book case covering his lower legs, but most of my son is covered by 2 layers of 5/8" drywall. I would of course, after grabbing the shorty, be trying to move to the left such that there was nothing but open air behind the bad guy, but considering he's already in the bedroom doorway while I'm blinking away sleep and fumbling to rack the slide, doubt that I'd have time to move a few feet across my wife to get a safe backstop. In my particular HD circumstance I am most concerned about that element of the equation. If (more likely) I awaken while a bad guy is still downstairs, as I tend to be wide awake if there's any unusual sound (been up and out of bed with a suppressed .22lr in my hand many times, running down the stairs, only to find a raccoon has come into the kitchen through the cat door - and not shooting them of course, just chasing them back outside), I'm a lot less concerned about backstop as there's nobody anywhere near our home. Still, less damage to plumbing and electrical wires is better for me. So wax slugs make sense, at least until I get to the carbine. And if I haven't managed to lay the bad guy out it's probably going to be because he (they) are running down the street while thanking whatever god they believe in for their luck in evading certain death.
The shorty 12ga is for short indoor or short outdoor range use, with projectiles tailored for indoor use in that application, and projectiles manufactured for use on big critters for outdoors. I'm not seeing the argument for splitting the difference for HD use. The risk of over-penetration can not be overstated. But if I lived alone, sure, I'd have 00 buckshot loaded every time. And probably use the longer Wingmaster as my bedside gun.