Posted on 08/07/2015 8:28:43 AM PDT by w1n1
The shotgun is an iconic weapon most often associated with the pump-action badassery of action films and video games. While awesome in fiction, its use in the real world is limited to close combat and breaching doors, not to mention bird and deer hunting. Despite its drawbacks, a mystique surrounds the weapon, and soldiers as well as law enforcement officers still use them. The draw of the gun is so powerful that the Pentagon has spent several decades and millions of dollars to improve on the basic design.
In the late 1960s, the military and private companies started tinkering with prototypes for a super shotgun. Three decades later, questions about the weapon’s purpose and practicality on the battlefield doomed the project. The proposed super shotguns were revolutionary, but perhaps to a fault.
Since World War I, scatterguns have been a fixture in American military arsenals. In the trenches, where fighting could be brutal and often hand-to-hand, the short-range idea wasn’t a problem. In World War II, individual soldiers or Marines, especially in the Pacific, carried shotguns to help clear out bunkers or break up ambushes. The same situation persisted in both Korea and Vietnam, but even throughout these eras, the US Army and Marine Corps mostly issued the weapons to military police officers on guard duty.
“The usefulness of the shotgun in combat has long been the subject of some controversy,” Carroll Childers wrote in the January-February 1981 issue of Infantry magazine. “Unfortunately, a great deal of romanticism about its use prevails.”
At the time, Childers was an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., as well as an officer in the Virginia Army National Guard. In 1969, Childers started work on what he hoped would be a radical new design dubbed the special operations weapon, or SOW. Childers based his initial concept on the needs of and feedback from Navy SEAL teams and Marine reconnaissance troops. The shotgun’s features made it an attractive weapon for specialized units that often had very specific requirements.
During the Vietnam War, Marines complained about how contemporary scatterguns needed to be constantly reloaded during firefights, couldn’t reliably hit anything — let alone kill — at even modest ranges and couldn’t stand up to the abuse of a patrol, according to Childers. The SOW prototype looked fearsome and crude, but it solved many of these key problems. The gun was fully automatic and fed from a 10-round, detachable magazine. Unlike the fixed tubular designs on most shotguns of the day, a shooter with an SOW wouldn’t need to reload one shell at a time, and they could swap out ammunition types — pellets, solid slugs and more — with relative ease. Childers’ gun was also compact compared to the other types of firearms troops took into the Vietnamese jungle, at least in length. With its simple stock folded — or removed — the SOW was shorter than the pump-action Remington Model 870. Read the rest of the combat shotgun story here.
Range? Check out the “mini grenades” with the AA12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV379084djs
Rifled aluminum slugs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG7X0AYpVaU
We used shotguns when I was on gunboats in Nam when searching boats or barges in the harbor and other close quarters work. They aren’t much use at any kind of range over a few yards.
Shotguns are good for wing shooting and hallway clearing, not much else. And I love shotguns. No range unless you want to be launching a slug.
In years past, I would have agreed with you. But the there is a new generation of buckshot rounds. I think they are Winchester law enforcement, but I could be wrong.
A friend of mine brought about ten rounds of these law enforcement shells. We loaded three rounds of regular generic buckshot and fired at a target that was 25 yards away. The target was a black two inch dot with a one foot circle around the dot. The diameter of the circle was about 12 inches. Almost all of the buckshot hit at the edge of the circle between 4 and 8 o'clock. We then fired three rounds of the law enforcement shells. Almost all of the pellets were within a four inch circle hitting the center dot.
Trying to figure out how the law enforcement rounds did much better, we looked at the buffer in the shells. Most buffers are like cups with a compression design. The law enforcement shell buffers had little wings that pushed out when fired. I think that the little wings causes the buffer to separate from the pellets much earlier than a standard buffer; which minimizes the disruption of the pellets when the buffer moves away. Our range did not go further than 25 yards, but 4 inches at 25 yards was not possible 30 years ago.
Gen. Childers is a good guy and I like a lot of his ideas. I am a combat shotgun fan because most engagements occur either very close or very far away. The up close stuff is the most common and the shotgun is far superior to a submachinegun:
1. An 8-round magazine load of 12 gauge 00 buckshot is 72 9mm-size soft lead slugs. A 9mm submachinegun has about 30 rounds of hardball available per magazine.
2. When a submachinegun is out of loaded magazines, reloading will take time. Just about as ugly as running out of ammo in a firefight. Shotguns can be replenished while it still has a round in the chamber, ready to fire as needed.
3. Submachineguns rise fast while being fired. If you haven’t got a solid stance, rounds #2 through #10 end up above your target. Shotguns recoil but all their pellets are going together to your aim point.
4. Shotguns are flexible. You can load them with everything from breaching plugs to FRAG-12 grenades for a very wide span of effects.
5. You can still beat your adversary to death with a shotgun. Much harder to do with a submachine gun.
Later
Joe Biden likes his double barrel for shootin them crooks through the front door.
Ah yes the venerable 97, a thing of great beauty. A wonderful thing to have as your enemy gives you the bum rush.
Mine makes for a pretty good quail, dove gun too, but no buckshot! My Dad choked it for hunting.
Cool. My dad gave me one, don’t shoot it much. My 870 is the workhorse.
That’s one gal who I call DANGEROUS!
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