by J. B. Wood
Contributing Editor
The ultimate gun for police and home defense.
If you were going to design the perfect shotgun for home defense and law enforcement use, what features should it have? Let’s see: A short barrel, yes. Hey, why not make it a bull-pup, with a pistol-grip? Make it slide-action, not semi-auto, and make all controls fully ambidextrous. Finally, give it a large magazine capacity, and make it in 12 gauge, so you’ll have a wide choice of loads.
Well, you can cancel your design project, because George Kellgren has already done it, in the Kel-Tec KSG. It has all of the features described above, and more. The handy package is just over 26 inches long, and weighs, empty, a little less than 7 pounds. The barrel length is a half-inch more than the required 18 inches. Thus, with the bullpup design, there is no protrusion at the front for the bad guy to grab as you go around a corner.
Most remarkable, perhaps, are the two built-in 7-round magazines, side-by-side, below the barrel. At the rear of the pistol-grip unit is a selector that is easily set to feed the right or the left magazine, and there is a central position that blocks both of them. You could have, for example, rubber stun-type loads in one magazine, and serious-business stuff in the other. If the chamber is loaded, you have an awesome 15 rounds.
All of the other controls are perfectly located for easy operation. The manual safety is a push-through type, at the top of the pistol-grip, displaying a large white “S” and a red WFB. The off-safe movement is toward the right. The slide latch is at the upper front of the trigger guard. It has release levers on both sides. My Lyman Electronic scale says the trigger pull averages 8 pounds, with practically no take-up or over-travel. This is good, because the last thing you want on a gun of this type is a light trigger?
On top of the barrel unit, and extending rearward about 12 inches, there is a MIL-STD-1913 Picatinny rail, so you can mount any type of sight. No sights are provided with the gun. I chose to mount an excellent set from Magpul, perfect for the KSG. They fold down when not in use, and spring up to lock in place when one of the ambidextrous levers is depressed. The front sight is vertically adjustable, and the rear aperture has a knob for horizontal adjustment. The contact information: Magpul Industries Corp., PO Box 17697, Dept. TGM, Boulder, CO 80308; phone: 877-462-4785; website: magpul.com.
There is also a 6-inch rail on the bottom of the slide handle, for attachment of other items, such as a flashlight. A nice black Nylon sling is provided. It can be attached on either side at the muzzle, and on the underside at the rear. Even though the slide handle encloses both magazines, it is not too wide for my average hand. One warning: Be sure the operating hand is well forward when cycling the action. If not, you may “short-stroke” it, causing a mis-feed, and also get a nasty pinch!
This is noted in the well-written manual, and it didn’t happen to me.
I tried the KSG at 7 yards with three different loads, two from Federal and one from Remington. I have found that with shotguns, newsprint-paper is often better for showing patterns than regular targets. The Remington “All Purpose” load with #8 pellets hit dead center, with a 6-inch spread. The wads, of course, made a big hole in the middle. This would be a good in-house defense load. It would make any intruder very uncomfortable, and would be unlikely to go through a wall.
The #4 Buck load from Federal was also well-centered, with the .24-inch pellets in a 7-inch spread. Federal #00 Buck (.35 caliber) made a neat pattern, with five of the pellets in a lower 2-inch group, and the other four in a one-inch group, slightly above. At around 1,300 feet-per-second, a devastating delivery. Neither of these, of course, could be considered “wall-safe” for in-house use.
Functioning of the KSG was flawless, and the felt-recoil was less than I expected. I even tried a couple of shots with the gun at belt-level, with the butt against my side and arm. No problem. The pistol-grip helps. Even so, with my age and bone structure in mind, I probably won’t do it again. Another help in the felt-recoil department is that the point-of-balance is at the center, over the pistol-grip.
Considering the features, and the consistent high quality of Kel-Tec guns, the suggested retail price of the KSG is quite moderate at $880. Here is the contact data: Kel-Tec CNC Ind., Inc., 1475 Cox Rd., Dept. TGM, Cocoa, FL 32926; phone: 321-631-0068; website: keltecweapons.com.
