A short-barrel carbine like this Beretta ARX 100 makes an excellent home defense weapon. It’s compact, yet far more powerful than a handgun.
I just had a wonderful opportunity to directly compare pros and cons of different guns (or weapons systems as my instructors say) for home defense.
You see, I just (barely) graduated from Tactical Pre-School. They were threatening to have me repeat, but I don’t think any of the instructors wanted me back for another session.
My tactical pre-school took place at the Academi training facility in Moyock, North Carolina. The folks at Beretta Defense Technologies hosted the event as a way to give some of us pre-schooler tactical folks proper exposure to a variety of Beretta tactical guns. Sprawled out over 7,000 acres just south of Norfolk, Virginia, it covers all the tactical subjects for pre-schoolers to doctoral studies. With 25 live ranges, an airstrip, multiple offensive and defensive driving tracks, and several explosives ranges, it’s got everything. Heck, just sitting the mess hall trying to match uniforms to special forces teams of various allied countries is entertaining, and just a little bit scary.
Anyway, this is all relevant because my tactical arts and crafts training covered four primary tactical disciplines: pistol, carbine, shotgun and long-range precision rifle. All, well most, of these are pretty darn applicable to home defense. Long-range precision rifle might be a stretch unless you have a reciprocal agreement with a neighbor to set up sniper overwatch hides. My neighbors suck at long range precision shooting, so that plan is out for me as I would have to carry the load. The class was a great opportunity to spend a couple of days contemplating the relative pros and cons of using a pistol, rifle or shotgun as my primary home defense platform.
To be clear, our abbreviated training focused solely on fighting with these respective platforms. I learned a lot about each, but just as importantly, the quality side-by-side training time got me thinking.
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each platform.
Another good read…THANK YOU!