Shotgun

Nineteenth century illustration of a shotgun

A shotgun is a long-barreled firearm designed to shoot a straight-walled cartridge known as a shotshell, which usually discharges numerous small pellet-like spherical sub-projectiles called shot, or sometimes a single solid projectile called a slug. Shotguns are most commonly smoothbore firearms, meaning that their gun barrels have no rifling on the inner wall, but rifled barrels for shooting slugs (slug barrels) are also available.

Almost all are breechloading, and can be single-barreled, double-barreled, or in the form of a combination gun. Like rifles, shotguns also come in a range of different action types, both single-shot and repeating. For non-repeating designs, over-and-under and side-by-side break action shotguns are by far the most common variants. Although revolving shotguns do exist, most modern repeating shotguns are either pump-action or semi-automatic, and also fully automatic, lever-action or bolt-action to a lesser extent.

Each shotgun discharge produces a cluster of impact points instead of a single point of impact like other firearms, and have short effective ranges. In a military or law enforcement context, the high short-range blunt knockback force and large number of projectiles makes the shotgun useful as a door breaching tool, a crowd control or close-quarters defensive weapon. Militants or insurgents may use shotguns in asymmetric engagements, as shotguns are commonly owned civilian weapons in many countries. Shotguns are also used for target-shooting sports such as skeet, trap and sporting clays, which involve flying clay disks, known as "clay pigeons", thrown in various ways by a dedicated launching device called a "trap".

Hunting

In a hunting context, this makes shotguns useful primarily for hunting fast-flying birds and other agile small/medium-sized game without risking overpenetration and stray shots to distant bystander and objects.

Dependencies

• Black powder
• Shotgun
  • Hunting
  • Projectile

See also

• Pistol
• Rifle
• Weapons

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Shotgun, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).