Ironic, isn't it, that the supreme court case that supposedly allows gun control (miller) claimed that the second amendment didn't apply because a shotgun with a barrel length of less than 18 inches has no military purpouse........(never mind that it was the favorite weapon in the trenches of WWI which was the last war that the U.S. was involved in at the time)
And isn't it even more ironic that the justification for the federal and various state AWB's is that the banned weapons are "weapons of war?" If anything, Miller protects them (even if semi-auto) far more than so-called "sporting guns"). Further irony occurs when the same people cite Miller as being a justification for gun control, and specifically an AWB. This last bit shows that they either haven't read the case, that their reading comprehension is at about the level of my non-reading 3-year-old or that they're just a bunch of lying sacks of $hit.
Even more timely with respect to the Miller decision, the Marines were probably using shotguns during various "Banana War" interventions, IIRC.