Training with the 1301

The last two posts have looked at some of the options and setups available for the 1301 family but how do we use these things?

If your only concern is home defense, life is pretty simple. Pick the gun you want, learn how it works, and then practice “up” drills at the different distances you have in your house. In my case, that means that I load the magazine fully, plus a shell on the carrier. I leave the safety on so all I need to do is rack the charging handle and manipulate the safety to shoot. I prefer to use the safety the same way I do on an M4 or a 1911. Safety on if not shooting, safety off as I go from ready to “up”.

Loading the gun is an administrative issue, and does not need to be done under stress. Under stress, all you do is rack the bolt and put your trigger finger on the safety. As mentioned previously, reloading the gun is not a part of domestic civilian fights, so if you have somewhere between 6 and 9 rounds in the tube, you should be just fine.

What I’ve outlined above is the lowest level of user ability needed to make the 1301 work for home defense. It is also the most realistic look at using a shotgun in America.

What if you want to move beyond the real world and the relatively mundane “bottom line”, and learn to master the gauge? Then we need to focus on manipulation. “Load what you shoot” has been a part of shotgun training since Gunsite started modern shotgun training. The reason for that is that the magazine capacity of most shotguns is pretty limited compared to other weapons. Partly because of the nature of tube magazines and partly because of the nature of Gunsite, the doctrine of topping off the gun took hold.

A complimentary (or conflicting, depending on your outlook) aspect of the shotgun identified early on is that you will only have the ammo on board the gun to fight with. This led to butt cuffs and side saddles being mounted to plus up the capacity when grabbing the shotgun. Equally applicable to home defense or policing, most people will never have ammo-carrying capability on them when they need the shotgun. As we saw before, do we need more ammo than the tube offers?

Let’s say we want more ammo with us, and so there are a couple of possible reasons for carrying spare ammo on the gun. One reason is of course that some fights do need more ammo. With the shotgun, this tends to be a military thing, but I would never begrudge someone from having spare ammo with them in an unobtrusive way. Another reason is that you may want to take advantage of the multiple loads that are available for the shotgun. The repeating claymore is best used with buckshot most of the time, but sometimes a slug might be called for. If the fight starts at some distance or becomes prolonged and moves further away, a slug could be handy. In a prolonged fight, a slug might be needed to defeat the cover that your adversary has hidden behind. How do we manage these options?

If you simply want more buckshot with you, just in case, then loading a sidesaddle with whatever you load your gun with is the easy way to go. This allows you to load what you shoot without any complication. On the other hand, if you want slugs, then you have some decisions to make. Do you fill your side saddle with slugs, or do you split your spare ammo between buck and slugs?

The problem with “load what you shoot”, and filling your saddle with slugs, is that if you fire a couple of rounds of buck from the gun, and then want to top off, you are now putting slugs in the pole position, rather than the magazine of buck that you wanted when you grabbed the gun.

You also have some decisions to make regarding the orientation of your spare ammo. Brass up in the side saddle favors single-loading the chamber, and brass down favors topping off the tube. I don’t think there is a wrong answer to this issue, but there are better ways to stage your ammo, depending on your intended use. Some pictures below illustrate the various acceptable ways to stage your spare ammo in the side saddle.

The top picture shows how I tend to carry my spare ammo (all slugs up, or 2 slugs up and 3 buck down. The pic shows Federal slugs in red and Brenneke slugs in white, but the 3 Federal slugs brass down are meant to represent buck for this discussion.) The bottom picture shows splitting the load on a 6-shell carrier, or simply putting all ammo brass down. I generally prefer all slugs and brass up, but I don’t think the other options are wrong, depending on your circumstances.

I view the shotgun as a buckshot shooting machine, therefore my magazine is loaded with Federal Flight Control. Given the realities of shotgun use in America, I intend to shoot the gun till the fight is over, or I run out of ammo in the tube. Probably, the fight will be over before I run out of ammo. In case it is not over, then I will reload the gun as needed from my side saddle. Since I went through 8 rounds of buck and still have adversaries running around, I think it is safe to assume that they are either behind cover or at some distance, so my side saddle is filled with Brenneke slugs. They are carried brass up, as I think it unlikely to need them at all, and if I do need them, I want a fast reload into the chamber. If I have time to load the tube, the slight increase in time that it takes to load the tube from the brass up position does not concern me.

I’ve run out of time and space for this week, but here is a short video showing me shooting the Symtac shotgun test that was modeled after our very own FAST test. I don’t know that I did it to standard, but I think the targets and other aspects are close enough for you to get an idea about what is going on.