Shotguns: The 5 Best On the Planet

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

Simply the best. 

The shotgun is fitted with a variety of iron sights, including ghost ring and tritium sights, and the receiver is drilled and tapped for a MIL-STD1913 Picatinny rail, allowing the user to install specialized optics. Length of pull is an unusually long 14 3/8 inches to accommodate the user’s bulletproof vest. The U.S. Marine Corps uses a similar version, the M4, designated the M1014.

A shotgun is a firearm, typically a long arm that is fired from the shoulder, that instead of a single bullet fires a number of smaller pellets. Shotguns are chiefly sporting arms, useful for hunting birds or other small, fast-moving game, but also have military and civilian self-defense uses. The ability to project a devastating pattern of lead or steel shot to short ranges is also valuable in urban or jungle environments. This makes a properly fitted out shotgun an excellent weapon for home defense or close quarters combat.

(This first appeared last year.)

Winchester Model 1897

Developed by the prolific American firearms designer John Moses Browning, the Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun was better known as the “Trench Gun” in World War I. Originally designed as a civilian sporting gun, the Trench Gun version sported a twenty-inch barrel, making it easier to handle in the narrow trenches of the Western Front, a bayonet lug for hand-to-hand combat and a heat shield. Trench Guns were used not only to clear narrow trenches during attacks but also, interestingly enough, to shoot down hand grenades flung towards American lines. The six round tubular magazine made it a formidable adversary when fired lengthwise down an enemy trench; a single 1897 shotgun could send fifty-hour .33 caliber pellets downrange in three seconds or less.