Taurus Judge Home Defender Review

At first glance, the Taurus Home Defender gives off series meme gun vibes. The name Home Defender does make an inherent claim to serious use, but is that the case? Today, we find out. 

The Judge, Me, and Home Defense 

I left a pretty scathing review of the Judge at Gun University. I don’t like the gun, and I never have. Taurus is a pretty good sport and was still quite willing to send me the Home Defender variant. The Judge came out in 2006 and turned heads. A revolver that fires .410 rounds will get some attention, and the Judge did. It became an insanely good seller for Taurus and was a big hit. 

I didn’t like the gun because .410 sucks out of a 3-inch barrel, and it still sucks out of the bigger 6-inch barrel variant. It fired .45 Colt decently but sucked at the main gimmick of firing .410. For legal reasons, the gun has to have a rifled barrel. Rifling creates chaos for buckshot, and the short barrel cuts down velocity, and velocity also affects buckshot patterns. 

The Judge Home Defender extends the barrel to 13 inches. We still have to contend with rifling, but the longer barrel will help with velocity. Will solving one problem create a better .410 revolver? That’s the real question. 

Legally, the Home Defender is a handgun, so the gun can be exceptionally short, and .410 offers low recoil. If the patterns are right, maybe the Home Defender could be worthy. The little gun holds five rounds of .410 and comes optics ready with a rail for a light. It’s fairly well-thought-out for home defense purposes. 

Does the performance match the window dressing?

The Judge Home Defender – Get To Patterning

When I got this gun, I thought it was pretty neat. It’s a giant revolver—massive—and it’s smile-inducing. I wanted the gun to work because the look alone entertained me. I tossed on a Vortex CCW Defender red dot and even scraped up a side saddle from a Picatinny-mounted rifle shell holder. 

As much as I wanted to start patterning buckshot to see how well the gun worked, I began by zeroing the red dot to .45 Colt. As I let the big, 200-grain rounds sail, I was infected with surprise and shock. My previous experience told me the Judge had ho-hum accuracy with the .45 Colt round. 

From 25 yards, I could stack the rounds right next to each other. These rounds have to jump fairly far through the 3-inch cylinder to reach the rifled barrel, but this doesn’t seem to cause accuracy issues. 

With the dot zeroed, I grabbed a couple of boxes of buckshot and cautiously set up a target at 10 yards. I used an IPSC-sized A-Zone rectangle as my patterning target. The first load was a standard buckshot round from Remington. This is a five pellet 000 buckshot load. It’s a lot of lead for a .410. 

I coked the hammer to the rear, centered the red dot on the rectangle, and applied the little tension necessary to drop the hammer. The buckshot sailed through the air, and every pellet landed within that 6 x 11-inch A-Zone. Color me surprised and admittedly pleased. I let lose the next five rounds, patterning each one inside a new A-zone. Even the worst pattern remained within the A-zone. 

Call it scientific curiosity, but I want to know how the Home Defender patterned compared to a standard smooth-bore shotgun. I dropped the same Remington rounds in a Mossberg 590 and hit the full send button. The 590 patterned slightly better and slightly tighter, but not exceptionally so. 

I searched for the old Federal .410 handgun loads shortly after obtaining the Judge Home Defender. Sadly, they were discontinued, and my disappointment mocked my optimism. A month later, I perused a gun shop out of town; lo and behold, they had a pile of it. As quickly as Federal discontinued it, they brought it back. I grabbed a box of the 3-inch 000 load and promptly patterned it. 

This four-pellet 000 load falls a pellet short of the Remington load but patterns very tight—this specialized .410 handgun load would be my first choice for the Home Defender. It stays within the A-Zone out to 15 yards, and at 10 yards, pellets are stacked on top of each other. 

Riding the Lightning 

The Judge Home Defender has this great long forend/handguard that ends in a rail. This forend gives your support hand a spot to hold the gun and supports that 13-inch barrel. It makes mounting a light easy enough and makes the weapon easy to hold up and aim. 

Revolver guys desperately want to know what the Home Defender does to rectify the cylinder blast from revolvers. The gap between the revolver’s cylinder and the forcing cone allows some burning gunpowder to escape out the sides of the gun. With a hand forward of the cylinder, the barrel blast can be downright painful. 

Taurus minimized the issue by installing blast shields on either side of the cylinder. These cylinders remove the brunt of the blast, but not all of it. Depending on the cartridge fired, you’ll run into different levels of cylinder blast. 

I never wanted to tap the mat, but after a couple of hundred rounds in a single day, my forearm was a work of modern art. The artwork was black from carbon and tiny specks of red from blood. 

No single round met my threshold for pain, and if I were only firing five rounds in a defensive encounter, I’d never even notice. Heck, if I fired 25 rounds, I wouldn’t notice. It’s only in the high round counts where a whine left my mouth. 

Drills and Skills 

This massive gun doesn’t have much recoil, and I’d compare it to firing a .357 Magnum through a medium-frame revolver. The recoil does vary between loads. In measuring the recoil of defensive ammo, I found the Winchester PDX .410 loads to be the harshest and the Hornady Critical Defense .410 to have the lightest recoil. 

With buckshot, I could go from low ready and deliver a shot on two targets in less than two seconds. I got it down to 1.37 seconds for one run. I could do a double tap of buckshot on one target in about a second. I’m not wrestling the gun or fighting it at any point. 

It’s tough not to compare this gun to the Mossberg Shockwave. Compact .410s are a small genre, and these two are the most prevalent. One advantage it offers over a pump-action shotgun or firearm is that it only takes one hand to operate. I don’t have to work the pump; in a pinch, I could shoot the gun one-handed repeatedly. 

Round After Round 

I fired a ton of different buckshot loads, .410 handgun-centric loads, and lots of birdshot through the gun. Its diet of .45 Colt was limited to fifty rounds because, man, .45 Colt is expensive. Everything ran and fired without a problem. The action was slick when I started, but I got a little gummed up after all my shooting. Luckily, a little Hoppe Number 9 and a toothbrush cleaned things up and smoothed it right back out. 

The closest thing I had to a problem came from Fiocchi’s birdshot. The rounds fired fine but swelled up and stuck into the chamber. A hit from a wood dowel freed them, and after two cylinders, I stopped using them. Everything else extracted fine. Some are a little stickier than others, but the ejector rod pushed them out easily enough. 

The MSRP sits around seven hundred, but the street price is below six. That’s still a bit more than the Mossberg Shockwave but also a lot more complicated than a Mossberg pump gun. It seems reasonably priced, especially for its novel nature.

Taurus Judge Home Defender Features

1 Optics Rail

2 Extended Ejection Rod

3 Light Rail

4 Built-In Blast Shields

5 Long Foregrip

Taurus Judge Home Defender Pros and Cons 

Upgrades and Accessories for the Taurus Judge Home Defender

Streamlight TL RM1 

Upgrades and Accessories

Streamlight TLR RM1		500 Lumens Ramp Style Switch Compatible With A Pressure Switch	Check Pricing!
Monstrum Tactical Picatinny Side Saddle (.243 Winchester)		Holds Five Rounds of Spare .410  Mounts Perfectly to The Top Rail  Shotguns Need a Side Saddle	Check Pricing!
LOK Grips		Larger Grips Great Grip Texture Large Palm Swell	Check Pricing!

Ammo for the Taurus Judge Home Defender

Federal .410 Handgun 3-Inch 000 Buckshot 

If you plan to toss this gun in the home defense role, then the Federal .410 Handgun 3-inch load is perfect. It patterns tightly and throws four big 000 projectiles per trigger pull. I’m unsure what the magic is in this laid, but it worked perfectly with a rifled barrel. 

Federal Game Shot 

The Federal .410 game shot seems to be the most common birdshot on the market. It’s cheap, available, and perfect for training purposes. The recoil is light, and ejection isn’t a problem. The Federal Game shot line would also be a decent pest cartridge for snakes and similar animals.