...About a month ago, a local police agency here got into a gunfight with a murder suspect. Two of the officers involved had 870 shotguns loaded with issued Federal LE-132 9-pellet low-recoil 00-buck. ...The fight occured at about 35 to 40 yards distance.

...

However, when the paramedics peeled the suspect's cheap leather coat off of him, numerous 00-buck pellets fell out of the leather material onto the floor of the ambulance. Let that sink in a couple seconds. The low-recoil buckshot had failed to fully penetrate the suspect's outer garment, a leather coat, and the pellets were embedded and stuck in the material.

I don't think that any of us would be overly surprized by this. I just hope our younger defensive shooters don't really believe that, because low-recoil Flite Control buck patterns amazingly well at 40 yards, it will work well on a live target at 40 yards...or more. Penetration in gel, in a sterile lab environment, doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with penetration in people...especially at extended distances.

... As you can imagine, most of our buckshot shootings are at across-a-large-room distances, or at the distance of a car-length, more or less. The low-recoil buckshot ammo worked superbly there....

...Still, though, you can for sure say that the full-power buck is more dangerous at extended distances than the reduced recoil variety.

The shotgun enables a skilled defensive shooter to convincingly dominate an adversary at what would normally be considered pistol-fighting distances, and perhaps a bit beyond. That's the thing I keep in mind about a fighting shotgun. I happen to agree with those detractors who sneer that a shotgun is a "niche" or "special purpose" weapon. They're right...it's just that those "niches" and "special purposes" keep cropping up again and again with uncomfortable regularity. At least in the real world.