This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Sawed Off Shotgun: From YKTTW
Gattsuru : Okay, after the Weapon Of Choice article, I just want to clarify this. Shotguns are not the katana of modern-age roleplay. They may be the favorite of munchkins, but unlike Katanas v western swords, in real life they just tend to be much more effective than normal guns. To give the information values : a Desert Eagle pistol chambered in .50AE, one of the most powerful handguns commonly found in civilian use, fires a single 325 grain bullet at 1305 feet per second, equal to 1229 foot-pounds of force. An M1 Garand chambered in 30-06, a high-end hunting and game round, fires a single 150 grain bullet at 3,000 feet per second, roughly equal to 2800 foot-pounds of force. A Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun meets or significantly exceeds that. With buckshot, it's equal to a full ten rounds of 9mm Luger. With the right slug, it can achieve a good 3500 foot-pounds or more.
Rifles can be very, very powerful : http://brassfetcher.com/hornadyamax.html , but they don't compare to http://brassfetcher.com/Federal%203%20inch%20mag.html what type of damage even a 20-gauge shotgun can do. A 12-gauge at short-range is just ugly http://brassfetcher.com/12%20gauge.html .
More over, the fairy tale of a wide arc on even short-barreled shotguns is, well, just that. Arc is not dependent on barrel length; it's dependent on the amount of 'choke', or tapered section at the end of the barrel. While most sawed-off shotguns are "cylinder" choke, which have no taper at all and thus the widest spread, there is nothing physically preventing a user from adding a chock to the end of a sawed-off shotgun, nor is there any law of government or physics from preventing the removal of a choke from a longer shotgun other than that of basic design. Even with a cylinder choke, you'll still get your entire shot pattern within a 30 inch piece of paper at 20 yards. Length of barrel does decrease velocity, but because shotguns use fast-burning powders, the difference in not as significant as most would expect.
HeartBurn Kid: Rotated the image to make it not throw off the page formatting as badly; original is here
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Kersey475: Where do I go if I want to list examples involving normal non-sawed-off shotguns?
Gattsuru: I don't think there's a trope page for just general shotguns. Short-Range Shotgun covers nearly all media appearances, though, since very few avert the exaggerated stereotype of shotguns as having massive spread and stupidly short effective ranges.
Phartman: Shotguns Are Just Better seems to apply mostly to video games, but it's also a fairly new entry.
"This is because in British English, the past tense of saw is sawn, and the American English version is sawed."
Johnny E: No, the past tense is "sawed", but we use the past participle - American English seems to reject that whole word class. A horribly worded example: "He sawed off the end of the shotgun until it was entirely sawn off, creating a sawn-off shotgun".
Phartman: No, folks; in all likelihood, you won't break your wrist if you fire this type of shotgun with one hand. I've fired with both a traditional cruiser (i.e. pistol) grip and one shaped more like the classic sawed-off, and I can confirm that both are very unpleasant to fire (the cruiser grip moreso), but my wrist was just fine afterwards. If you go in expecting no kickback, then you may sprain your wrist. But if you brace for it and hold on tight, the rest of your arm absorbs the recoil.
As for the unpleasant part: take a piece of rebar and whack your hand as hard as possible between the thumb and index finger. That is what one-handed shooting feels like with 12-gauge, tall brass, 00 buckshot. Best to disregard the Rule of Cool and keep both hands on the weapon; that foregrip was added for a reason.
I think that the appeal of a sawed off shotgun is actually a subtrope of the larger appeal of compact versions of large weapons.
