Or rather, the joys of FLITECONTROL.

I love Federal Premium’s FLITECONTROL wad in their shotgun loads. It allows you to deliver a tighter payload at longer distances. I know popular (faulty) knowledge is that you want to use a shotgun to spew forth a cloud of instant death, but really you don’t want that sort of pattern. You want as tight as possible for the application at hand.

I was happy to read the new Box O’ Truth #56 doing some tests with Federal FLITECONTROL in #1 buck.  You don’t see much #1 buck, but “Old Painless” makes a viable case for it. The thing is, patterns matter because pellets matter. You are accountable for every pellet that comes out of that gun. I recall hearing a story told by Tom Givens of some police action, but I admit my memory is fuzzy on this particular story. The key thing I remember was a shotgun was involved, buckshot was involved… and all the pellets hit the bad guy… well, all pellets but one, which hit the innocent hostage. That’s not what we desire. When you have more pellets coming out of the gun, you now have more bits of lead that you have only so much control over, but still all the responsibility for. So having 15 #1 pellets vs. say 8 00 pellets, the math says with 15 you have a better chance of one going where you didn’t want it.

But then, in comes FLITECONTROL. Look at the pictures Old Painless took. Very consistent with my shotgun ammo trials. This is why FLITECONTROL is a must-have for personal defense shotgun rounds. This isn’t to encourage taking long(er) distance shots, but more so that it helps to keep the payload on target. It improves your chances of taking care of the matter at hand, and reduces chances of undesired issues.

I’m not sure I’ll adopt this #1 buck, even with the FLITECONTROL. It’s new, relatively speaking, and I’m not going to rush out and deal with this. 00 buck is pretty standard and established. In fact, I’ve desired to move from the 9 pellet to 8 pellet loads (Federal Premium Tactical FLITECONTROL 8 pellet 00 buck, reduced recoil — ATK catalog # LE133 00). But what’s cool to see from TBOT is more demonstration of FLITECONTROL and why it’s the solid (only?) choice if you’re going to use a shotgun for personal defense.