My thoughts on buckshot.

It never occurred to me that 00 would not be optimal, for several reasons discussed above. I’ll have to give it some thought. I have some 00 for ‘home def’ but a shotgun is not my primary go to.

My shotguns are primarily bird guns and that means not great defense guns (pumps are mostly waterfowl and longer barrels, shorter upland guns are stackpoles and therefore two shots…). If I was to have a shotgun prepped for defense, I’d need a good bit of setup.

(I have another issue with #4 buck and BB shot that I’ll bring up separately…)

I'm looking forward to it. Back when I was a teenager, BB was the go to for coyotes when using snow mobiles. My ex-wife used that load on the neighbor's pitbulls in our barn. It worked well then, but that was maybe 3 yards.