With the carbine becoming more and more popular, is the day coming when the shotgun will be completely phased out of LE service or will there always be a place for this weapon?
I feel as though the shotgun has a purpose still, but it is secondary to the rifle for sure. If one is carried in a patrol car, there had still be a rifle right next to it.
I dont believe the shotgun will ever be phased out completely. They’re just too versatile. We carry rifles in our cars, but Ive used the shotgun much more, especially to put down injured or sick animals. In any sort of tactical issues, Ill grab my rifle first. Still, though, I’ll never want to give up the 12ga. completely.
I don’t think they’ll ever be completely phased out.
1-They’re too inexpensive compared to an AR. Most departments won’t have the money to ever issue ARs like they do shotguns.
2-You can breach with them.
3-There will always be the guys who believe “if you just rack it the bad guys will get scared off, you can’t miss with a shotgun, one round will knock em down, ARs will shoot through walls and kill folks two houses down the street”. And as long as people believe all that, shotguns will have a place.
Every year the number of shotgun operators decline in my department. I’ve been to qualifications with a 50% failure rate and many just turn it in afterwards. On the other hand we have hundreds of shotguns in the armory and allow private purchase. The cost of the gun and rounds is still more competitive than rifles, but is still a more complex weapon when dealing with manipulation. I don’t see it going away any time soon.
The shotgun is the most versatile weapon in the LE inventory, and it does do one thing very well: put people down at close ranges. Now I’m not going to argue that a carbine in what ever flavor or caliber can be just as if not so more lethal at close range (depending on carbine ammunition selection) and is certainly more so beyond 50-100 yds (depending on shotgun ammunition selection). However you can’t door breach with a carbine and you can’t deploy less lethals with a carbine. If these are mission critical tasks for your job, why not train on how to do lethal things with the shotgun too?
The biggest fault of the shotgun is that it requires the most effort to make it work (at least in the pump varieties). With training and practice however you have a very powerful and versatile weapon system available to the average officer.
-Jenrick
Nothing better for a vehicle stop.
Slug - Ferret - Buck - Buck - Buck
I wouldn’t call it the most versatile when it only holds six rounds, extra ammo is hard to carry, they’re slow to load and the recoil is hard for a lot of cops to manage when you do get it loaded.
Using a regular shotgun for less lethal rounds is a recipe for disaster.
On our department, all uniformed positions qualify with the shotgun, whereas rifles are issued to individual officers.
I am not going to try to say I buy the rationale, but many believe it is easier to train up and stay proficient with the shotgun over the rifle.
I do feel the shotgun will always have a place in LE. It is effective at close range, versatile with different types of ammo, and reliable. They can take a bunch of abuse and neglect at the hands of officers that are not “gun people” and still work in the cold when dragged out of the trunk. They can be issued to different officers from shift to shift, as a bead front holds a universal zero. Advances in ammo technology help them stay effective, and increase accuracy.
While not always the best choice, they remain an effective tool in the toolbox.
At my department we are lucky to have both an 870 shotgun and Colt M4… I like having the option of having both… There is nothing like the rack of the 870…
You know they come out backwards of how you load them. :rolleyes:
Stagger loading - how do you know you will ALWAYS need a ferret round on the second shot? And then just buck?
I think you should run the load you think will most often be appropriate for your circumstances and then use sidesaddles to up load specialty ammo.
It’s all fun until that staggered loaded ferrett round you intended to shoot turns out to be a 00B at 35 yards and nails a passenger.
Most cops interviewed after gunfights don’t know exactly how many rounds they’ve fired, why should you expect them to keep track of where a specific round is in the mag tube of the shotgun? Especially if they are sustain loading.
Not trying to be a big jerk, but sometimes the cool kids may not have thought it all the way through.
People that use a shotgun for a vehicle stop like this have a dedicated shotgun for that purpose - it is marked with paint or tape as the vehicle gun and there is one guy on the detail that lives only to use that gun. Much like a less than lethal loaded gun or a breaching gun, a vehicle stop gun is not a regular patrol shotgun.
The idea is far from new and it has worked many times…
Roger on the first part… and a dedicated, staggered load shotgun is in my opinion, the appropriate loading for disabling a vehicle and getting people out of it.
My experience with side saddling speciality rounds is that it is a lot harder to fumble those rounds into the gun real time…
Among LE users, is there a general preference for one type of sight over the others (bead, rifle, Ghost Ring)?
You are going to get several different answers for that.
For buckshot use the bead will work just fine, if you know how to use a shotgun they are faster than the ghost ring or carbine sights.
For a moderately proficient shotgunner, shooting something he/she knows the POI of, beads will also be sufficient out to 50 or 60 yards with slugs. I’ve seen a lot of officers put slugs on top of each other using beads at 50 yards during shotgun quals.
The average officer may not have an issued shotgun with a side saddle and generally may not have slugs available.
If you are using the shotgun for less-lethal, once again beads are just fine, ranges are short, and your window of opportunity may be fleeting.
The ghost rings are slowly but surely taking over from the rifle/carbine sights on shotguns for LE in my area, this is largely because of the availability of ghost rings on shotguns sold for HD/LE.
The advantage of the ghost ring and carbine/rifled sights is that you can make fundamental errors mounting the shotgun into the shoulder and achieve a sight picture.
There are no guarantees in life. As I mentioned, stagger loading a shotgun as you indicated seems based on the guarantee that you will need one slug to stop the vehicle, then a ferret (we are talking 12ga chem agent round, correct?) to incapacitate the occupants and gain compliance, plus three buckshot rounds - just in case.
I really don’t think life works that way very often.
My experience in shooting slugs at running vehicles is that a slug will stop them… eventually…when the engine seizes.
The wide range of less lethal munitions by itself, in my opinion, will keep shotguns around in LE departments for a long, long time; to the point where it’ll take some leap in technology for something to replace it (long range taser, alien ray gun, or God knows what). When you mix in cost, how modular they are, and their effectiveness against vehicles; that just sweetens the deal.
if you know how to use a shotgun they are faster than the ghost ring or carbine sights.
A much better phrasing would be: If you practice and are proficient with bead sights, they are faster then other sighting systems you don’t use.
I can run a ghost ring WAY faster then I can a bead sight if I’m striving for accuracy. Why? Because I’ve got a lot of carbine time under my belt, easily into the ten’s of thousands of repetitions. A bead sight, maybe a couple of hundred if that. I can run the hell of a shotgun, but I’m not nearly as fast when looking for precision with bead as I am ghost rings.
-Jenrick
I have a few rounds through aperture sights on shotgun, AR. subgun, even target air rifles - I made my statement from that frame of reference.
As you quoted me,y ou’ll notice I said ‘if you know how to use a shotgun.’ IMHO one of the key, if not the key component of fast shooting with the shotgun is correctly mounting the weapon into the shoulder.
I wish we still had shotguns at my department, we have made all department shotguns into less lethal, each car carries an M4 and a less lethal shotgun. So…no department or personal shotguns for duty use =(
That sucks. I carry a department 6920 but also carry my own private purchased 870P. I mainly deploy with the rifle but my 870p still has that special place in my heart.