The Myth of “Non Lethal”

Ever since Taurus started marketing this silly gun, I’ve been saying something like this would happen:

The gun, a model known as “The Judge,” was loaded with bird shot, and Davis took aim at her husband and emptied all five of the weapon’s chambers as he fled through the yard, Bonnett said. He was hit in the upper and lower back by two blasts before escaping, Bonnett said.

Connie Davis shot her husband after he admitted to a prior affair.  Full stop.

It doesn’t matter that the loads were likely insufficient for causing serious bodily harm.  Ms. Davis leveled a deadly weapon at another human being and pulled the trigger.  That’s the salient fact, and it illustrates my problem with the Taurus Judge.

In case you’ve missed the marketing blitz, the Judge is a 5-shot revolver chambered for .45 Colt and .410 shotshells.  The design has been marketed before, but Taurus tapped into a certain zeitgeist, and their version has been a resounding success.

As a self-defense firearm, it’s sadly wanting.  The grip is awkward and the trigger is dreadful.  Since the chamber has to be abnormally long to accomodate .410 shells, it’s too long for .45 Colt loads, resulting in a long jump before the bullet reaches the forcing cone.  There goes accuracy.  The gun is too small for higher-end loadings and is likely not engineered to handle them in any volume.

Performance with shotshells is fairly spotty as well.  What keeps this from being an NFA weapon is the fact that it’s a rifled barrel rather than a short-barreled smoothbore.  The only problem is that a short, rifled barrel wrecks the pattern and inertia of the small pellets.

So, what are we left with?  Well, it’s a good close-range gun for snakes and other small vermin.  Aside from that, it’s not very useful.

That hasn’t stopped it from becoming wildly popular, and people are buying it for the wrong reasons.

Take Mr. and Ms. Davis.  I’m willing to bet that when they bought the gun, she didn’t know the first thing about firearms.  Ms. Davis likely protested, “I don’t want to kill someone; I just want to scare them off.”  As we all know, there’s no chance that birdshot could seriously maim or kill, right?  It’s almost as anemic as, say, .22LR.  That never kills anybody.

So, Mr. Davis gave his wife the Judge as a magic talisman, expecting  that it would ward off danger while absolving its owner from all the icky stuff that happens when you shoot someone. In doing so, he did her a great disservice.  Ms. Davis never learned to think of the gun as a tool for killing. To her, it was likely about as harmless as pepper spray or a light whack with a frying pan.  As we all know, neither of those has ever killed anybody either.

Right?

What she didn’t know is that it’s still a firearm. It’s designed as a weapon.  She shot her straying husband with it, and she could have killed him.  The jury’s going to have to take that into account.

The worst part is, she probably didn’t mean to hurt him all that badly, but a lack of any proper training led to a flippant and unacceptable attitude about guns.  Now, her impulsive act of lashing out constitutes attempted murder, along with the corresponding penalties.

In no way do I lay the blame solely on the manufacturer. It’s a free country, and if people do dumb things with a product, the liability should fall on the user. Still, there’s something about this gun, and about the way it’s being marketed, that makes me very uncomfortable.

If you want a good .410, there are great 16″ smoothbores available cheaply.  If you want a gun in .45 Colt, get a nice N-Frame or Redhawk.  Save the novelty guns for weekends at the range.