The Truth About the .410 for Home Defense (What the Box Won't Tell You)

The Truth About the .410 for Home Defense (What the Box Won't Tell You) THE BENCH BOOK + 2 TOOLS → https://dylanbenett.com A woman named Margaret Hale came into the shop last winter carrying two shotguns, one under each arm, and she set them both on my counter like she was returning something to a store. She is seventy four. She lives alone on eleven acres at the end of a gravel road, twenty minutes from the nearest sheriff's deputy on a good night. In October, the house a mile down from hers was broken into while the owners slept. Nobody was hurt. But Margaret did not sleep much after that. The first shotgun was her late husband's, a Remington eight seventy twelve gauge, the one he kept in the bedroom closet for thirty years. She had tried to shoot it once, at her grandson's urging, and it knocked her back a step and left her shoulder purple for a week. She told me she could barely hold it up long enough to aim. So her grandson, who is a good kid, bought her something lighter. A little four ten pump. And with it, a box of birdshot, because, he told her, birdshot will not go through the walls. He sleeps over most weekends, and he wanted her safe without anybody getting hurt by accident. Then she took both guns to a big sporting goods store to buy more shells, and the man behind the counter laughed at the four ten. He called it a squirrel gun. He said she might as well throw rocks at an intruder. And he offered to take her husband's eight seventy in trade, a hundred and fifty dollars, toward a six hundred dollar semi automatic twelve gauge that he said would kick less. So Margaret had two people who love guns telling her two opposite things, and a third person trying to sell her something. She came to me to break the tie. I did not answer her about the four ten. Not at first. I asked her one question. I asked where her grandson sleeps when he stays over. She told me. And that answer changed everything about what she should keep in that gun, and where she should stand if she ever had to use it. It is number one on this list, and by the time we get there, you will understand why I asked it before anything else. Here is what we are doing today. The four ten is one of the most argued about home defense guns in America. Some videos call it the ultimate house gun. Some people call it a toy. Both sides are selling you something. I am going to give you ten truths about the four ten for home defense, built on real testing, on some numbers that surprised me when I first saw them, and on what I see across my counter. Two of these truths will probably make you angry. One of them might change where you stand in your own hallway. I am Dylan Benett. I run the service bench at a gun shop, and a lot of the people who bring me a four ten are not hunters. They are people like Margaret, people who want to feel safe in their own house and have been given advice that does not agree with itself. One thing before we start, and I mean it. Nothing in this video is legal advice. The law on defending yourself in your home is different in every state, and sometimes in every county. If you keep a gun for protection, sit down with a local attorney or a good instructor in your state and learn the rules where you live. Now let us get into it. Number ten. The four ten defense shell was invented for a revolver. Go back twenty years and there was almost no such thing as a four ten home defense shell. The four ten was a squirrel and snake gun. Nobody was designing serious loads for it, because nobody was asking. Then, in two thousand six, a company called Taurus put a revolver on the market that could fire four ten shells. They called it the Judge, and it sold like nothing anybody expected. Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of people walking into gun stores asking for four ten ammunition to defend themselves with. The ammunition companies followed the money. Winchester announced a load in late two thousand nine, built with three flat copper discs stacked on top of a dozen small round balls, and their own announcement said it was designed for use in that revolver. Federal, Remington and Hornady all came out with their own defense loads in the years after. More than one gun writer has said it plainly. That one revolver is the reason the four ten defense aisle exists at all. Why does that matter to somebody holding a four ten shotgun? Because a lot of the shells on that shelf were tuned for a barrel three inches long, not eighteen or twenty four. Some of them say handgun right on the box. They will fire in your shotgun, but they were not designed around it. When you buy a defense load for a shotgun, read the box and look for one that was built and tested for a shotgun barrel. It is a ten second read, and almost nobody does it.