Should be "buying puts" if you replicate a short.

It's not a clear-cut situation - in times of turmoil, when many traders are considering a short, the price of options will rise. If the situation then calms down and the price of the underlying decreases steadily, the drop in the option price due to lower volatility will offset a lot of the potential gain.

When expressing a trade using options one has a lot more parameters to deal with in order to formulate the risk-reward properly. I'd say it's exactly the sort of thing most amateurs shouldn't be doing.