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Shotguns certainly have their place when battling the undead. Still, an anti-zombie defense in depth strategy should always incorporate a formidable last ditch point defense.

My extensive computer simulation analysis of zombie attacks* indicates differing outcomes:

1) In fast, intelligent zombie scenarios, assault rifles and shotguns cause insufficient damage to put down zombies before they can attack and contaminate you. Those things can dodge, and anything but a direct hit just won't be enough - and forget headshots in close quarters. LMGs recommend themselves. In particular, the Ruchnoy Pulemyot Degtyareva is your best bet for mowing down lines of sprinting beasts slavering for your flesh. Its rate of fire actually put it above other LMGs available for testing, especially in the ideal "covering a flight of stairs while prone" scenario. You will need someone to cover you while you reload, though, and ideally at least one of them with another RPD. On the downside, once you do get bit, you will strangely still be inconvenienced by the weight of the weapon (despite no longer holding it), reducing your ability to catch the delicious morsels fleeing your outstretched arms - at least until you respawn.

2) In medium-speed, dumb zombie scenarios, you can much more easily get solid center-of-mass hits, which seemed effective on test subjects. the swarming capabilities of these undead (crowds of over 1000 sighted, with hunting packs up to 42 in size) far outpace the first type (endless resupplies of perhaps 20-odd packs) - you can't fend them off from a fixed position they can run to with any weapon, and you will never get a break as they prepare for a mass charge. (And that's not even considering that they are known to randomly phase through walls level with good footing!) Climbing, hiding, and observing where their pathfinding capabilities falter are key. If caught in the open, you need to put down the closest ones and break clear of any masses. LMGs will tear through the oncoming hordes, but as you're standing and shooting, they're coming up behind you, and you'll run markedly slower getting away. The shotgun really wins out.

The Winchester Model 1200 will serve best with its higher ammo capacity than the Benelli M4 Super 90, and once you're more safely situated, will blow apart closely-packed groups of zombies climbing up to reach your perch in satisfying geysers of blood. In a pinch, you can even use a combat knife, but you will take some damage if they can also reach you. Alternately, if you trust in your ability to reach a safe perch with long lines of sight, any sniper rifle will let you pick off approaching zombies with alacrity - though you will want allies to take care of any that get close.

I will concede, however, that my simulations have not been privy to data from true Romero-class zombie outbreaks involving slow-moving, extremely-durable zombies requiring cranial damage to destroy.

EDITED.

Great point, amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics. You've gotta find a way to make sure you can keep the supplies coming or you're not going to live past the first wave.

i knew this was the right place to post that.

"Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"

The real place to be is in a concrete structure with a steel door. The door needs exacly one slit, no larger than 2"x8" that is capable of being secured. Makeshift pill-box is going to be the boiler room in large buildings, or any tornado shelters that are around. Raid camping and sporting goods, get underground.

I'm calling this all off base.

Look, zombies don't bleed out. The wound cavity produced by an assault rifle depends very heavily on you having damagable organs and it being bad if you start leaking your own fluids. Neither of these assumptions follow in the zombie apocalypse.

What you need is something that can take out the supporting structure of bones or get you full head removal. Nothing accomplishes those things like a 12 ga. I would call a pump / semi Benelli M3 with a full tube (8+1) more or less my first choice. I don't think an assault rifle can as easily allow you to hit the head nor does it have the finality that comes with eight pieces of 00 buckshot entering the zombie's face. Also, in line with the reality that headshots are very hard to execute outside of computer simulation, the 12 ga gets you the mobility kill. How about 00 to the hip or the leg? Yeah, he's still coming, but that's plenty of time to get yourself an axe.

In short, I'm sympathetic to the lack of ammo problem, but I think you would waste a lot of rifle rounds to get a fraction of the effect of one easy to attain hit with a shottie.

Well, the general premise is that the brain is damageable. Still, that doesn't take especially huge damage - any hit to the brain region generally drops a Romeo-style zombie.

I don't think the full head removal is necessary, but I absolutely agree on the latter point. :)

Now a bigger-scale question - what about the nightmare scenario of Return of the Living Dead, where the zombies are fast, smart, and apparently impossible to put down? Would modern thermobaric weapons and whatnot achieve the necessary destruction of the contaminants that an airbursted tactical nuke failed to destroy?

Seems to me the only way to take down that kind of zombie short of a nuke would be some sort of rocket launcher. Blow them apart.

Myself, I always carry pure rock salt to deal with zombie problems. Shove a mouthful down their throat and it dissipates the bad juju that allows them to animate themselves. Like wood on a vampire. Shotgun shells with salt in them also work for this, though not as quickly since they're adulterated somewhat in the blast.

I recommend the Flash games "The Last Stand" and "The Last Stand 2". (The original was rather easy; #2 is ridiculously hard by comparison.) Both of them teach that the main lesson is having lots of people on your side. Doesn't matter if you have the überweapon, if you're out there alone you're going to get killed. More people means more hands to fight and to build.

Even worse. They get bit and become zombies. They're like a 5th column. They're the thoreaus of the War on Zombies.

in that vein, apparently the best mode of attack against a field of zombies is use of the whirling blades of a helicopter (a la 28 Weeks Later and Planet Terror). Just somethin' to think about.

I'm inclined to agree with Mo about the AK-47, except in medium- to long-range distances, the thing kicks like a mule and puts out a helluva lotta noise. Of course, depending on the situation, you might not care about the noise. The thing it has going for it is general reliability and the availability of parts.

Of course, long-term zombie success is going to depend on forming an "oasis" of some sort, so in the scenario of "the shit is on", the AK-47 and the shotgun are entirely appropriate. However, in the long term, your oasis should undoubtedly be defended by mines, electrified wire and long-range shooting weapons (like the M4 or M-16, or various sniper rifles and the like).

Saiga isn't a bad idea. I still question the AR as a tool that can't to anything unless you grab the head. Maybe it is just my gut reaction that in that scenario, I want the most damaging thing I can get my hands on.

I definitely understand the ammo concerns, but I keep coming back to the zombies coming at you in close quarters, and at that point there is no question you'd rather have the 12 ga. I don't think you could 'stay on' with a .223 grabbing headshot after headshot.

Regarding reloading and such, a 'rolling thunder' drill is illustrative. You can keep a shotgun going by feeding round after round into an empty chamber, and stacking the tube when you have a chance. Still not as good as a 30 rd box mag, but the difference isn't as bad as it might at first seem.

Short of zombies that pile up and climb like army ants, you'll want obstacles, entanglements, and most of all walls to hold a position.

The comic Walking Dead is one of the few good, big serial zombie-apocalypse stories that actually looks at the problems and stresses over the long-term. In it, the protagonists clean out and hole up in an abandoned prison (at least by the point I got to), which works very well - but getting in and out is still tricky.

EDIT: in it, they argue that standard riot gear is great for dealing with zombies so long as you're not too tired (or the crowd of dead isn't too big and tight) to push them off you and keep them from bearing you to the ground.

Not true in zombie movies. :)

If you hang with the sole survivor, you're doomed by definition. :)

Zombie moves can have survivors, but they don't have an obvious one-who-lives character type. After all, the genre started with a total cast kill. :)

Somewhat relevant to this thread:

Well, of course. But complaining that that's not completely practical in real life is like complaining that Olympic skiiing is useless because most people don't have perfectly groomed Super-G runs like that OH NOES I CROSSED THE STREAMS!

The Borg are similar to zombies in many ways. Picard has killed many Borg.

Predators.

No, wait! Aliens.

Um....Uwe Boll?

AWESOME

So what? IPSC shooters are all adults who are capable of telling the difference between reality and a game. Frankly, I think the whole "Gun games will get you killed!" meme is totally overblown. Otherwise we'd have seen reports of bullseye shooters being found dead at the scene still clutching a Walther GSP in one hand and their belt buckle in the other, or Cowboy Action Shooters being shot by muggers because their view was obscured by the brim of their hat, or IPSC guys shot dead because they were executing a standing reload* in the middle of a gunfight.

In truth, I've seen absolutely no evidence whatsoever backing up the notion that competitive shooting somehow ingrains habits that will get you killed.

This is not to say that there is no value in training geared towards the real world. You know better than anyone else here that places like Front Sight or guys like Larry Vickers or Pat Rogers have much valuable information to offer, and a lot of it contradicts what's written in the rulebooks for various competitive sports, but I submit it doesn't matter. Partly because most lethal force encounters are going to be at extremely close range and between two people, but also because those who regularly shoot in situations that put them under some level of mental stress, be it through training in a shoot house or going to an IDPA match, have some idea of how they will perform.

*Which, if you're shooting IPSC and doing a reload when you aren't moving, you've just screwed up majorly.

Pardon the threadjackitude, but shooting well is muscle memory of gross motor motions, and you absolutely revert to how you train under stress. Drawing out of a real holster from real concealment is a skill that requires maintenance. Reload under stress and when you don't know your round count is a skill that requires maintenance. Firing defense loads out of a normal sized weapon is not in the same ballpark as firing low recoil tweaked loads out of a 6.5" 19 chamber ported speed gun. IPSC is fine and fun as a sport, there is no doubt in my mind that it trains bad habits.

It doesn't appear in the data because the number of encounters between any formed of trained person and armed bad guys is far below a statistically appropriate sample size. There aren't that many trained shooters involved in shootings.

Interestiong; I was actually wondering about that in relation to Jason's concern (but got distracted before I could pose that question).

EDITED for clarity.

People suck in fighting from martial arts because they don't spar enough, and if they don't spar enough, their martial art is a lame one.

Which brings up a good question: If you had to go hand to hand with a zombie before you could grab your fire axe on the table across the room, what would be the best style? ;)

Also, fire axe=craziest weapon ever? Who but a madman would try to fight a fire with an axe?

best anti-zombie style? chainsaw.

OK, as per Dr T's invitation my comments on this thread.

Full disclosure, I haven't read the whole thing yet, so someone probably has said the same thing.

But that guy who wrote the 'Top 5 Reasons Not to Use a Shotgun' is wrong.

Anyone who thinks you are going to make headshots on a person trying to attack you has never shot a person trying to attack them. I don't know, Mediageek, or any of the other commenters who compete and are really good at shooting, might, might be able to pull it off. I consider myself a good shooter. I routinely outshoot other people in my business, and I couldn't make head shots with a pistol or a rifle, at people (or zombies) in close proximity and coming at me.

With a shotgun, you might have limited rounds, but at least you can make your shots count, rather than the frenzy of misses before you are eaten.

So, now I'll read the rest of the thread.

Hey,
So having read through the thread, some people brought up similar points.

Love of belt fed machine guns is overrated when fighting zombies. Belt fed machine guns work against humans because hip shots and leg shots, and torso shots put a human down, they don't do anything to zombies. I suspect if you shot at a wave of oncoming zombies with an RPK or a SAW, you should be shocked at the amount that keep coming.

As an ideal defense, I would like to be on top of a big mall with all kinds of food, an independent energy supply, a gun store, and sturdy doors locking the facility. Then it would just be cool, you could make sport of shooting the zombies, you could test innovative methods for killing them.

You could fix up a bus or something to move around to guns stores and whatnot to get resupplies. I suspect I would run out of zombies, before it ceased to be entertaining killing them.

It would be nice if the company you kept involved capable chicks, voluptuous ones, and some rednecks or competitive shooters, (or military).

Also, I don't understand all the love for the m4/ m16.
Unless they are the new generation of piston m4, and unless they are in a 6.8 caliber or something. The regular colt and bushmaster m4s are crap. They jam, and the round is tiny with no stopping power. It is more accurate than the AK at distance, but so is a lot of shit.

Zombies don't charge. They shamble at one mile per hour.

In the old zombie movies they shamble, in the new ones they are all athletes that charge, but still have very short attention spans.

The old zombies were easy to deal with, and really are more of an entertainment than a threat (though they still kill you if there are lots of them and you don't outrun them.)

So, I think that you have to plan for the new zombies, and your armory has to reflect that.

Come on man! This is 2008...zombies are fast as all hell (and thereby 20x more terrifying). Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later? Are these on your radar, FFF3K? :-D

On the old-style shambler zombies, I don't think head shots would be terribly difficult. On the new-style running ones, they'd be a royal bitch.

Thing is, I'm not totally convinced that the spread you get from a shotgun would make that much of a difference, at least within ten or fifteen yards, even with a cylinder-bore choke. And, sadly, I'll admit that I have completely missed an IPSC-style target with a shotgun.

Of course, it also has much to do with what the particular situation is. If you're relatively safe in a properly fortified building such as a mall, you would probably be just fine camped out on the roof with a 10/22 and about four bricks of ammo.

But if you're hunting down a couple of zeds in the basement, the shotgun would be a good choice.

Zombies have no realistic response to airpower. Fuel-air, white p, napalm, whatever. Corral a bunch of suckers who voted for the other guy last election into an open field and bait the zombie menace toward them, maybe by dropping bits of soul food leading out of the city. Fire from above does the rest.