Shotgun choke

 

Shotgun of known choke on left. Mystery choke on right. Two "hanging chads" on bottom of card on left were NOT counted.

One of my neighbors showed up with a shotgun with a screw-in choke insert. He did not know what "choke" it was and wondered if I had any way to measure it.

I think I confused him when I told him "Choke doesn't kill rabbits, pattern does".

We sometimes get carried away measuring proxies for what we really care about. There are times when it is more straightforward to measure the result that we actually care about.

I folded a 3"-by-5" card in half and taped it to a cardboard box and then paced off twenty paces. By my figuring, the heart-lung area of Peter Cottontail is about half the size of a 3"-by-5" card.

A shotgun with a known choke was fired at the first card and I counted six pellet holes in each half. By my figuring, three pellets through the H-L of a rabbit is sufficient for a humane kill.

The shotgun with unknown choke was fired using the same loads and I counted 7 holes in one half and twenty in the other. My conclusion is that the mystery choke throws a tighter pattern than the known choke.

The difference between the two halves of the card for the mystery choke is not a big deal. There are a boatload of factors influencing the uniformity through the center of the pattern and how much the fringes scatter. By any reasonable approximation, the mystery choke will be able to whack red squirrels (cross-sectional area of about the same area as a full 3"-by-5" card) with authority at 20 paces and humanely take rabbits out to 35 or so paces.

Good "science" would involve a larger grid of rectangles and many more rounds down the tube(s), but this demonstration was enough to give my neighbor confidence that his garden-defense tool was going to be a veritable death-ray for anything threatening his cabbages.