Firearms discussion thread

[panoptic blur]

About 15 years ago somebody asked me to post my firearms in PostMortem.

I was unable to do this, because at the time, I did not own any firearms.

This has since changed.

I can post pics of firearms now if people are still interested.

Failing that, we can still discuss firearms here if you like.

Discussion topic the first: Simultaneously firing both barrels of a double barreled shotgun is mechanically impossible for many shotgun models. Discuss.

[Daedalus]

Good lord. You're alive!

[panoptic blur]

Good lord. You're alive!

...I live... AGAIN...!

[panoptic blur]

Browing BPS 12.png (1.85 MiB) Viewed 18549 times

This is a pump shotgun. The ammunition goes into a magazine tube underneath the barrel, and the user needs to pull and push the wooden hand guard along the magazine to operate it between shots. This motion will eject any empty ammunition, and also feed a live ammunition into the top tube (the barrel). This is usually used for hunting, as the barrel is longer than usual. Because the mechanism is entirely hand-operated, it can accept a variety of shotgun ammunition loads, ranging from light pellets to hunt birds, to heavy slug ammunition to hunt big game like deer and bears.

Model is Browning Pump Shotgun, total cost was about $400 in 2020.

[panoptic blur]

Browning Cynergy 12.png (1.43 MiB) Viewed 18549 times

This a double-barreled shotgun - with barrels in "over and under" configuration (some older models were "side by side", but most shooters found the O/U arrangement to be much easier to aim). It's an older and heavier design, because each barrel adds a lot of weight. This is the fastest shotgun design for firing (since you can pull the trigger twice very quickly and the shotgun will fire one barrel then the other), but reloading is cumbersome and slow: you have to open the hinged portion where the metal barrels connect to the trigger module, and then manually slide in two more live ammunition shells, one in each barrel. This model of gun also has a small mechanism that "kicks out" an empty shell and "leaves in" a shell that hasn't been fired. This does not always work reliably and sometimes I have to pluck out a shell by hand. Like the pump action shotgun above, the double barreled shotgun is an old design, mostly for hunting, and it can accept and use a wide variety of ammunitions and shotloads.

Model is Browning Cynergy 12 Over and Under Shotgun, total cost was about $1,200 in 2022.

[panoptic blur]

Browning Auto5 12.png (1.73 MiB) Viewed 18549 times

This is a semi-automatic (sometimes called "auto loading") shotgun. It has one barrel, and a more complex mechanism just in front of the trigger (where the greyish metal slide can be seen). The auto loading shotgun uses the expanding gases from each ammunition shot, to push backwards into the gun, and operate a few important mechanisms: 1) it pushes the grey chamber slide open, which also pushes the empty shell casing out to the side; 2) it pushes a new live shell out of the magazine tube (below the barrel) and up into the chamber; 3) a rear spring then pushes the grey chamber slide back forwards again, sealing the chamber so the next shell is ready to fire. This is potentially much faster to fire than the Pump Action Shotgun above, but it has a drawback: the mechanism sometimes jams if the shell does not exert enough energy to push it fully back. Some lower-energy shells (especially for youth shooters or less-lethal ammunition) will not properly operate the auto-loader. Sometimes you can solve this jam by pulling the slide back and forward yourself by hand; other times you will have to take the gun apart to retrieve the jammed round. So it's not as versatile as the Pump shotgun, which can use any load that your hand is capable of cycling.

Model is Browning Auto 5 (which was incidentally the earliest design of semiauto shotgun ever to reach mainstream popularity, and which was later licensed out to many other gun manufacturers, including in Belgium and Japan). It cost me about $1,400 in total earlier this year in 2025.

[panoptic blur]

Bullpup S&W M&P12.png (2.51 MiB) Viewed 18549 times

Final shotgun! This is a "bullpup" shotgun, which is a term used for guns which are intentionally made shorter. In this case, they have pushed the trigger forwards along the gun (so the loading and ejecting is behind the trigger) to save space, and they have also reduced the length of the shoulder stock. This results in a gun that is very compact: it's slightly longer than half the length of the pump shotgun. There are disadvantages, though: the stock is very short and it's also completely straight, so it's hard to aim down the gun properly (because your eye line of sight will always be "looking down" towards the muzzle, instead of "looking along" the gun at the target). Also, the gun is much lighter than the other guns, which improves its maneuverability but also means it cannot absorb much of the backwards momentum each time you fire the gun. An experienced shooter can compensate for this with proper stance and form, but first-timers will almost always find this gun "punches" their shoulder very heavily and leaves a painful bruise for a few days. This gun also has two magazine tubes (side by side) underneath the barrel tube, and each one can contain six or seven shells, which means this gun could hold 15 shells at once. The Pump and Auto5 can only carry 5 at maximum, and the O/U can only carry 2. This gun is not a very popular design, but it specifically serves people who are looking to defend their homes, where a short, maneuverable firearm is preferable because any hypothetical target would be within a very short distance.

Model is Smith & Wesson MP12, total cost was about $1,000 earlier this year in 2025.

[panoptic blur]

I have also noticed that it is quite difficult to use two shotguns properly at the same time; I don't have the proper number of available limbs.

Perhaps the Guns Akimbo boost also gives extra hands?

[Daedalus]

Well, I'm not much of a gun enthusiast, but it's a good collection. Are you planning to add anything further in future?

[panoptic blur]

At this point, no plans for any more guns.

My gun safe only has room for four long arm guns, so if I bought one, I'd have to get rid of one... and I'm very happy with my sport-shooting trio (Brownings) and my home defense S&W.

Maybe if a gun should become irreparably damaged for whatever reason. But shotguns are very resilient so this is unlikely.

[Dead Reckoner]

Has a MOTGIAT ever gotten into your gun safe?

[panoptic blur]

Not without my permission.

There was a MOTGIAT who lived with me for a while, and we often went range shooting or sporting clays target shooting. The three traditional shotguns were common candidates for that exercise.

I once took a friend and her tiny elderly European mother out to the forest range, and her mother was deadly accurate with a tiny .410 caliber shotgun, hitting each clay target dead-on.

She claimed she had never fired a gun before but I suspect she might have been in the Dutch resistance or similar.

[Status Cruo]

Smith & Wesson MP12

Juicy! but if you think that's stopping a fent nigger in 2026 you're in for a bit of something.

[panoptic blur]

A word on ammunition for shotguns.

Historical: Shotguns derive their name from the original type of ammunition they typically used - shot (i.e. small lead pellets, instead of single large bullets). Early shotguns were designed to hunt small game, especially rabbits and birds. You didn't need much mass to catch small game because a single pellet to the wing will force a bird down out of flight, or a pellet to the leg will slow down a rabbit fast enough for your hounds to catch it.

When an ammunition load fires pellets down a metal tube, you want the tube to be smoothbore, i.e. no spiral rifling grooves down the sides. You want the pellets to accelerate uniformly down the barrel and then start to spread out once they leave the muzzle, to create a cloud of light pellets that can nick the prey and bring it to ground so your hounds can retrieve it for you.

Later shotguns have much more variable ammunition, but they still tend to proceed on the assumption that your firearm is using large cartridges, firing projectiles down a smooth barrel without grooved rifling, and usually at a slower rate than anti-personnel firearms like pistols or assault rifles.

Shotloads generally are not optimized for use against large animals (including humans), and any military force usually will equip their troops with other firearms if they expect enemy forces that shoot back (rifled bullets are especially popular). Shotguns occupy a quasi-improvisational ground as a flexible-ammo, multi-role tool that could be pressed into use for home defense, subsistence hunting, or sport shooting.

Gauges: shotguns are generally standardized in the measurement of "gauge" (also sometimes referred to as "bore"). The gauge is a number which indirectly describes the barrel's diameter, and a smaller number means a larger barrel. (The original calculus was "gauge number equals how many lead balls of this diameter will make up a pound in weight", so it's a denominator of a mathematical fraction.) The most common gauges for sport shooting are 12 gauge (about the diameter of a human thumb) and 20 gauge (about the diameter of an adult finger). The larger the number, the smaller the cartridge and thus the lighter the load per trigger-pull.

Some other less-common gauge measurements include: 10 gauge (larger than practical for most hunting or sport - this is often used in industrial shotguns for the specific purpose of cleaning out chemical residue from the insides of storage silos); 28 gauge (common in small bird hunting; former US Vice President Dick Cheney famously shot a lawyer in the face and chest with a 28 gauge pellet load and the lawyer survived, after a heart attack caused by one of the pellets getting stuck in a heart valve); and .410 caliber (which is about the size of a lipstick dispenser and has the lowest recoil).

Payloads: as mentioned above, the historical main use of shotguns was to fire light pellets as shotloads, to hunt small game. Larger loads feature larger pellets with different numbering systems, usually the lower the number the larger the pellet. #4 Buck is one payload used for intermediate game hunting, large enough to potentially take out big prey animals while also usable against smaller animals without utterly ruining the meat for a hunter - it's also described as a shotload that won't overpenetrate through sheetrock drywall if used indoors (meaning you could more confidently expect that you can fire it at an intruder during a home invasion emergency without risking your next door neighbor's life). 00 Buck is the largest commonly-used hunting pellet round, and it also doubles as an antipersonnel round used by law enforcement or military against unarmored enemy combatants.

Larger than the 0-ratings, you get into rifled slug calibers. These are a single plug shaped mass of metal, where the metal projectile itself has a spiral groove machined into its side, allowing it some mild torque as it accelerates down the smoothbore barrel. Slugs are still far less aerodynamically stable and thus less accurate than rifle rounds or pistol rounds (which are fired down rifle barrels, generating significant stabilizing spin). But they're favored when the shooter is targeting large game, such as deer, where a single concentrated hit with good penetration of tissue (e.g. head, heart, etc.) can end the hunt without a chase. Pellets used against such a target would likely just spoil the meat or leave the animal in an agonizing bleed-out chase.

Shotguns also have some other exotic ammunition types, some of which have niche uses. Phosphorus-based ammunition creates a short-lived flamethrower effect, best used out of a pump action or break action shotgun (since any auto-cycling gun would eject the shell while it's still emitting its flame chemicals). For those looking at less-lethal solutions, some ammunition manufacturers sell "beanbag" rounds with a mesh bag of projectiles that deals a painful hit on impact, without seeking to penetrate into vital tissue (although this is also described as "being hit by a baseball bat" even through body armor). For uses where spread is not important and focused armor penetration is important, you have sabot shotgun rounds, where a solid aerodynamic dart is fired from a shell and achieves enough spin to become flight-stable - some variants pack a number of flechette darts into one shell, creating a cloud of needle-like projectiles that can punch through some armor loadouts. In specialist situations, some shotgun ammunition can also feature chemical payloads, essentially turning the shotgun into a small-capacity grenade launcher: one pilot program featured pepper gas payloads in shotgun shells, allowing a police team to fire gas rounds through doorways or windows to disable armed suspects indoors.

Legal treatment: each ammunition type may be subject to different regulations in different jurisdictions, with varying laws about their sale, ownership, and use. I've currently encountered a quirky legal circumstance where it is lawful for me to purchase #4 Buck home defense rounds, but illegal for me to test these rounds at an indoor shooting range. I'm currently in the process of locating an outdoor shooting range which does not have these limitations so I can properly pattern test my ammunition.

[Daedalus]

Wish I had more to contribute to this, but I've generally had very little exposure to firearms, and gun culture isn't really common around here. Thanks for the very detailed explanation. I'm familiar with most of these terms from history and video games, but that's about it. When did you start to develop an interest in firearms?