There is so much in that article that's cringeworthy. Using the only tool at hand is hardly an endorsement of the suitability of the tool for the task. Just because
a guy used a battleaxe to fend off a home invader doesn't mean that we should all go out and buy battleaxes and make like Conan the Barbarian.
The discussion of the use of birdshot is inane.
What does this even mean?Sure, you can use cheap-jack ammunition in everything. Lots of people have been put into the ground by .38 lead round-nosed bullets, let alone .22 rimfires. That doesn't mean they're even close to being the better choice.
And then there is this: Because a double-action revolver is so,
so complicated to operate. Hell, so is an AK, a weapon that illiterate teenagers can be taught to shoot in, what, thirty minutes or less? (I'm sure you've seen the video of an African militiaman giving an AK to a chimpanzee.)
Or this: Other than a double-barrel Biden Special, this point is just bullshit. A repeating shotgun isn't going to be any more compact than a carbine. You still have to have a legal-length barrel, the action and the stock. The target audience of this piece isn't going to have that repeated stored with a loaded chamber, so they have to cycle it. If it's a pump gun, they have to cycle it each time, which is going to take some physical ability.
Now, let's discuss what the writer blithely passed over: Recoil. Anyone care to opine on the recoil of a 12-gauge coach gun or one of those no-shoulder stock guns like a Mossberg Shockwave?
I did a couple of searches on the author: Zita Ballinger Fletcher, who apparently also uses Zita Steele as a pen name. She has a background in art, she's written a bunch of articles for conservative Catholic publications, she's written some books about the photography of Erwin Rommel. Some listings say she has expertise in criminology and cybercrime. That all may be accurate. But what I didn't find was anything that she has written about actually shooting any kind of firearm.
In short, she seems to be a reporter in the tradition of "I don't have to know anything about what I'm covering."
To declare that she's a Fudd insults the true Fudds.