Shotguns and rifles are totally different animals. The inability to keep that point in mind is
why so many rifle manufacturers have such a hard time making shotguns –
especially autoloading shotguns.
You see, one of the biggest differences between shotguns and
rifles is ammo choice. Yeah, with my
.30-06, I could load small 125 grain loads and big 220 grain loads, but the end
result was a pretty similar bang and a .30 caliber hole in whatever I was shooting
at. With my shotguns, I can get 2 ¾ inch
poodle poppers that barely have enough juice to break a piece of clay at 25
yards, up to 3 ½” super magnums that will skin a moose at 30 and leave your
shoulder feeling like that same moose had a boot party on it, in its
honor*. Thus, the problem with
autoloader shotguns. You can’t set up an
auto-loading action in a shotgun so that it will cycle the low base rounds
without having it so sensitive that it will disintegrate itself if you cycle
some super mags. Likewise, you can’t
have it set up for super mags and expect it to cycle low base. With a rifle, you can pretty much expect it
to cycle any load that you put in it because they are all pretty similar, or at
least similar enough that the action will make do with what you give it. With a shotgun, you have such a range of
choices that you have to tinker with it between uses to make sure that it will
do what you need.
I tell you all of this so that I may tell you a story. The recent panic on ammunition has lead to
most of the stores in Spokane being sold out of almost everything except the
weird calibers and gauges. I saw lots of
.38 super and 28 gauge on the shelves yesterday, but not much else. I think that a lot of this panic buying is
being done by folks that don’t have a lot of gun experience and are basing what
they buy up on the price of the stuff per box.
With a rifle, this is not an entirely stupid plan – most rifle
ammunition will get the job done no matter what you buy – yes, I like 165 grain
in my 30-06 better than 150 grain, but it is close enough that it won’t make a
whole lot of difference, and it will get the job done the way a .30-06 was
intended. With a shotgun, however,
buying based on price without any regard for any additional factors will lead
to you buying a case of worthless crap for the purpose that most of these folks
are buying the ammo. Presumably, they
are buying them for doomsday prep – zombie apocalypse, government take-over,
pandemic, epidemic, whatever. The
purpose behind that would be protection against bad guys, and having the
ability to take game to feed your family.
I tried to find low base clay breaker ammo for a round of
sporting clays this weekend and 6 out of 7 stores were sold out entirely of 20
gauge low base clay rounds. To me, what
this means is that people are thinking “oh noes, I needs to buy teh ammos
before Barack Obama takes it alls away!” and so they go out and buy as many
rounds for their 20 gauge as they can, as cheaply as possible, without any
regard for the fact that what they bought is pretty much worthless against any
target more structurally sound than a 5” clay disc.
That, or there is some prepper angle about pestering the
zombies to death with handfuls of slow-moving lead sand that I haven’t read up
on yet.
A guy in one of the stores next to me commented with a bit
of snark about how irrational panics are usually not marked by rationality, by
definition. I have to agree.
We won’t discuss how I did on the sporting clays Saturday,
however, because I did horribly. Let’s
just say that my score out of one hundred rhymed with “nifty” and leave it at
that.
*As an aside, that’s
why when someone says “he shot him with a .30-06 deer rifle” I say “Holy crap!
That had to blow a big hole in him!” without needing any more information, but
when someone says “they shot him with a 12 gauge shotgun” I find myself needing
a little more detail, because being shot with a 12 gauge shotgun could range from “Meh – been there, done that
when my buddy wasn’t paying close attention when we were bird hunting, and the
shot bounced off of my carhartt and stung my earlobe a little bit” to “they
hauled a carcass out of there that resembled a huge mass of poorly ground
hamburger, and it took several trips.”
Honest to god – the difference is that big.
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