Firearms discussion thread

[panoptic blur]

One other complicating factor about shotgun ammunition is its sheer size. The average 12 gauge shell is about 18.5mm in diameter, which is over twice the diameter (and thus over six times the cross sectional area) of a standard 9mm pistol bullet.

Worse still, the shell is usually not uniformly rigid across its entire design - only the rearmost portion is usually made of metal, with the rest traditionally being made from waxed paper and nowadays made from softer plastic.

For these reasons, shotguns have generally remained manual-action. Either the user is expected to manually retrieve each spent round and place a new round in (as with break action guns), or the user operates a mechanism using their muscle power to eject the spent shell and re-seat a fresh one (as in pump actions or lever actions). The wide array of shotgun ammunition types, and powder loads, also results in much greater variation in energy release per round, and thus can thwart any standardized mechanism for cycling rounds.

Semi-auto shotguns are popular in sport shooting and hunting, but each design of gun needs careful testing with different brands of ammunition to make sure it will cycle properly. Lower-power rounds may not have enough powder (and thus energy) to effectively eject and seat rounds - and in the event of a jam, semi automatics usually have more points of failure than most pump-actions and almost all break-actions.

I have one pump action that does well with brass target loads (i.e. low powder, very small pellets for target breaking). Recently I tried a higher-power round which the seller recommended because it flies faster and thus reduces the deflection aiming necessary to hit a distant target. This worked poorly - the ammunition would fire, but the empty shell would get stuck in the barrel of the pump shotgun. I'd have to take apart the gun to retrieve the spent shell casing.

On closer inspection, the likely cause is the type of metal used in the cartridge - it seems to be a steel-based design, and thus it may have different metal properties after the heat and energy of the round firing, which then thwarts the pump mechanism. As a test, I ran a few dozen brass shotgun rounds through it and it worked just fine.

Perhaps a case of "the quality of the ammo is too high for the quality of the gun"!

[panoptic blur]

When did you start to develop an interest in firearms?

Mostly from video games, including Blood, Doom, Undying - most of them have shotguns of some sort. (The later Far Cry series even introduces different shotgun shell ammunition, for extra mission profiles.)

My first time training in using and firing firearms ironically came about when I was raised in the UK, where private gun ownership is now tightly restricted. As a teenager in the 1990s, I was mandatorially volunteered to train one year in the UK cadet forces, and I learned how to maintain and use an SA80 bullpup assault rifle.

Illustrative photograph below (I do not own this firearm):



This model of assault rifle was designed to be fired only right-handedly, though. I'm a left-handed shooter and the one time I tried firing this rifle, I forgot my proper side, and fired it from my left shoulder. This led to a hot bullet casing hitting my cheek and landing in my collar, and the discovery of all-new disco dance moves for the unwitting 1990s crowd.