A Word on Overpenetration: An anecdote

[Average Guy]

One late night about 10 years ago, I was startled to hear a loud BANG from my roommate's bedroom. Having heard him racking the slide on his Ithaca 37 just moments earlier, I immediately thought, "[Roomie] killed himself."

I looked into Roomie's room to see him looking sheepish on the bed, Ithaca in hand, gunsmoke hanging in the air. There was a 1.5-inch diameter hole in the wall that faces the backyard. Evidently he'd been unloading the shotgun by cycling the slide, and his finger had hit the trigger (he never used the "it just went off" defense, to his credit). Outside, the damage was about a 12-inch diameter crater in the stucco. The mesh underneath the stucco was exposed, but the birdshot load did not penetrate the outer wall. House is mid-50s era, IIRC.

(Amazingly, this was the second nearby indoor ND I had experienced. The first happened in Saudi Arabia a few years earlier, when a guy in our unit put a .223 round into the cement floor just across the hall, about 15 feet from where I was sitting. We were livingi in one of those pre-fab buildings with cardboard-thin walls. Now THAT would have been some overpenetration.)

Granted, interior walls may be a bit less hardy, but unless we're talking slugs in a double-wide, I'm not particularly worried about overpenetration with a shotgun. YMMV.

 

[dfariswheel]

I can't find it now, but I had an older book on Home Defense shotguns.

The author actually tested a variety of buckshot on a range of interior and exterior wall material, including lathe and plaster, wallboard, paneling, brick, cinder block, and wood exterior wall construction.

His tests proved that NO interior wall will stop any buckshot, and as I recall, no bird shot.

The tests indicated that only brick or cinder block exterior walls would reliably stop buckshot.

In fact, there are few things in most houses that will stop buckshot, including furniture and most refrigerators.

The author's conclusion to HD shotgun use in the middle of the night:
If your SURE it's a bad guy outside the bedroom, don't risk going out to face them. Just get behind the bed and shoot right through the walls until they leave, or get hit.

I'm not sure that's a good plan, but the point is, interior walls ain't buckshot proof and neither are most exterior walls.