[ggreer]

I strongly discourage shotguns for home defense. Shotguns have high recoil, making them a poor choice for inexperienced shooters. Spread is minimal at typical room distances so you need to be just as accurate as with a rifle or handgun. Most importantly, people tend to short stroke them in panic situations. If you want a long gun for home defense, a semi-automatic rifle is a much better choice.

That said, you probably want to be able to aim a gun while potentially having a free hand to use a phone, open doors, turn on lights, grab loved ones, etc. A handgun allows you to do all of those things and have higher magazine capacities than a shotgun.

[akerl_]

Eh, shotgun recoil is amazingly variable based on the weight of the firearm and the choice of ammunition.

I’d swear by my Mossberg 590, which has enough heft that decades-younger-akerl could easily manage the recoil.

I feel like you’re also underselling spread. You’re not going to be peppering an entire doorway from 5 feet away, but precision is much less relevant than with a handgun or rifle.

That said, if anybody reads the above comment and decides a rifle is their home defense weapon of choice, I’d strongly advice taking similar care to select the caliber and build. A .22 gives you no recoil but very little kinetic energy to work with. By contrast, anything in a more typical rifle caliber (.223 and up, essentially) and you’re running a pretty serious risk to anything that happens to be behind your target. If you’ve decided a rifle is the form factor you want, there’s any number of modern carbines chambered in typically-pistol calibers like 9mm / 40 S&W / 45, which in a carbine will have neglible recoil and mesh much better with a home defense situation.