Does your gun still "suffice?" Are you SURE?

This isn't a good picture, but here's my Mossberg 500. It came from the factory with a 20 inch barrel, sling swivels and eight round tube.
[IMG=left]http://www.whoseparanoid.com/csmk/Pics/Mossberg.jpg[/IMG]

Early '91...

I was the RO for a 50-man Sheriff's Dept. in western MO, and our menagerie of old S&W, etc. pumps was ready for retirement. I had a meager sum to work with and let myself get harangued into buying 590's instead of 870's, in order to get more guns for the money. The 590's had peeps and synthetic stocks, and they were and are good shotguns. I took each one out and sighted it to where you could bust a coffee cup at 50 yards over the top of a squad car, if you could shoot. I noticed they kicked a tad more than I was used to while completing this little task...

I took a 590 to the NRA Instructor school at Topeka that August, and we shot a lot of high-brass 00 buck/slugs through them over the week. The damn sharp line on top of the stock had made a nice purple welt on my cheekbone by the 2nd day. Scraping the mold line off with a pocketknife helped some, but it was still whaling the hell out of me. An old amigo who was there had a new 870, like the one in your photo except for the pad. He loaned it to me to shoot the third day, and my slug scores went up despite the bead sights. I believe I shot a possible with it on the last (qualification) run, if my memory serves.

I always preferred the way 870 handled, but the week at Topeka really drove the point home. The woodstocked 500's are fine too, but I don't care if I never get issued another synthetic one.

With an appropriate snort of derision to gunwriter hyperbole and hearty agreement that it's the operator, not the hardware, that wins the fight; some improvements are--in fact--improvements.

With regard to combat shotguns, I think that the following upgrades actually help the user.

Sights - Be they open or be they ghost-ring, they help with placing slugs precisely and with centering buckshot patterns on the target. We're not trapshooting, where a couple pellets from the fringes of the pattern will suffice to chip the bird. We're trying to keep all of those buckshot pellets on a chest.

Extended safeties - I like the Vang unit. These help one get the safety off more reliably at speed. A good thing.

Extended magazine tubes - Rather than getting all excited over having a couple extra rounds, I think the main benefit of these is that they allow a good basic load of ammo, while still allowing one to leave a "dead space" or two in the magazine to facilitate quickly loading slugs if the need arises. (For those who scorn the "select slug" option and growl about "using a rifle for rifle tasks"; just remember that life is a "run what ya brung" event and that one may not have the option of going and getting a rifle).

On-board ammo carriers - I like the Sidesaddle. However, a quality butt-cuff like the Sparks Cold Comfort does nicely too.

Shortened buttstock - For most users, the factory length-of-pull is too long for best use.

Lights - The Surefire forend lights are the best choice here. While it is pretty easy to use a seperate light with a pistol, it is more difficult and clumsy with a long gun--especially a pump.

All this is not to say that the fight can't be won with a more spartan shotgun. The fight might well be won with just a big stick. Simple is good, if not overdone. Eschewing legitimate improvements would have us all armed with sticks and rocks and crapping in the woods. Where should we have stopped? Matchlocks and outhouses? P.J. O'Rourke wrote that he had a stock, one-word response for those who bemoaned the passing of the "good old days". That response was "dentistry".

Rosco

Good points all, Rosco, but lack of any or all of those things does not make a good-running 870 useless or "insufficient." They're icing on the cake; they're candy.

The gun in the article in question had pretty much all that stuff. But NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SEVEN DOLLARS for the 870 so equipped? I figger that's pretty much about what I have in my Colt SP-1, AND my 870, AND my Mossberg 500 8-shot PUT TOGETHER. Now which would I rather have--one Superfly Special 870, or my three guns with the ability to arm myself, my kid, and a neighbor should the need arise? (The lovely Mrs. Snake, excellent as she is for most domestic and marital functions, would be utterly worthless in a lethal force encounter or threat management situation. She's Catholic and quite afraid of going to capital-H Hell if she kills one of God's Bad Creatures.)

Gonna try to post this pic one more time. If the board won't take it, I'll try to post a pic of my new midlength AR. Maybe that'll tell me if it's the picture or the board.

The Winchester 1200/1300 series are USRAC guns, and not to be confused with any of the original Winchesters from when Olin was manufacturing firearms. (Oooooooooooooooh, I still regret not getting one of those great ol' Super-Xs and setting it up the way John Shaw did his when he ruled the Three-Gun matches a quarter of a century ago!)

The only one of the USRAC Winchester series for which I ever had a hankering was their intermittently-produced "Mariner" guns in the mid-'80s, and I'm not sure why their smoothbores weren't more popular.

For my part, I've never been a big 870 fan, much preferring the more affordable and, at the time, better-designed S&W Model 3000. That 870 "lifter" problem earlier referenced in this thread was a serious concern to anyone who ever experienced one, and the Japanese addressed that one from the jump, and rumor hath it that it was the (modest) success of the Model 3000 which spurred Remington to come up with their Flexi-Tab "fix."

I have one Model 870 which the shadowy John Mattera presented me as thanks for editing his first book… it was an adjunct of one of his enterprises on which he failed to follow-through. It was an "Express" model to which he added Ghost Rings, a tritium front post, an over-sized safety button (not, unfortunately, the recommended by Rosco-san) and an extended tube. I played around with it for awhile, and it is now on it's way to become part of the battery of Rob's and my Lodge 1201 (foreshadowing here) brother, Arizeder, in its present configuration with the RamLine fore end, having had the Vang Choke/Vang Comp process performed somewhere along the line.

Essentially, when it comes to smoothbores, I'm a Beretta 1201 FP3 kinda guy, hence the cognomen by which our "Lodge" is known. (This might help to decipher Schmit's "sig" sometime.) Mine has the Gunsite roll-mark, and it does exactly what I want a shotgun to do, given that I've never ventured into the nearby Atlantic Flyway with one on my life.

I've always described it as "the Thinking Gunperson's Super 90" at about half the price. It is lightweight, fast-handling and utterly reliable, and I never had an opportunity to fully debrief the late Mark Penman, another strong advocate of the FP3, about his apparent late-life conversion to the Model 870.

I think that's about all I have to say about shotguns…