Hunting with a shotgun?

I bet your 18" home defense shotgun uses a fixed cylinder choke. In other words, buy all the choke tubes you want... but you can't use them.

You might as well buy a different barrel. They're not expensive.

Oh, and look up the hunting laws in the area where you live. I'm guessing that you have a shotgun with a capacity of 7 or 8 shells. You'll have to block off the magazine- most places limit magazine capacity to two in the mag and one in the chamber for hunting.

The easiest way to know your effective range with the existing barrel is to patter it. Take a large sheet of cardboard at different ranges. Find out how far you can shoot it and still get a reasonable pattern. Then hunt within that range.

Later, yes, it is worth getting another barrel.

The longer barrel, as others have said, does give you a longer sight plain.

What I see missing is that the longer barrel will also give you more performance from your shells, depending on powder burn time. Just as a guess, you could get another 10% performance/velocity between 18 & 28 inches.

BBTI: Ballistics by the inch --pistols & .223

http://www.ballisticsbytheinch.com/scope.html

The length of the barrel has no practical effect on the ballistics. If you're going to do a good deal of wingshooting, though, the longer barrel may be worth the cost. You can actually use that sight plane of the longer barrel and miss a lot less often than you will with the short barrel.

Hubbs,

The 18inch barrell will do just fine with the right choke. But if you plan on doing it a lot more I suggest you invest in a bird gun. These shoot 3-1/2 inch shells and will give you alot more pellets. Secondly the barrel lengths on those go up to 28 inches and gives you a slower but more controlled swing (when you point at the moving target). The choke depends on what bird you're hunting but in general I'd go with the improved cylinder. Also another factor is the pellett size this also affects the effectiveness of your shotgun I'd go with 7 1/2 or smaller imho birds excluding turkey in your case. Go out to a range or in your yard and pattern the gun for yourself and get used to shouldering it quickly they will pop out when you least expect it. Have fun hope this helps.

Barrel length has very little to do with the pattern that a shotgun throws. Just get a mod or full, depending upon distances expected and game hunted and you should be good to go.

August has it right........ You 18 inch barrel is most likely an improved cylinder barrel ~ meaning you can install a choke on it, It doesn't accept one......

You really should consider another barrel.... They aren't that expensive and only take a few moments to swap on........

You could with the right shells and choke do just fine but like others have said yes if you get into bird hunting get a dedicated shotgun with probably a barrel 26''-30''

There is one simple answer. Full Choke or Modified Choke