Sawed-Off Shotgun

As you can see, there is a huge difference between a bank manager and a bank manager who works in a mob bank.

"Combat Shotguns can deliver a heavy punch at close range and a generous pelting from a distance. Combat Shotguns are double-barreled, sawed-off killing sticks. These gats are the ultimate in pellet warfare."

— Doom II: Hell on Earth instruction manual

If you're a badass and you want your firearm to represent how awesome you are, there's only one choice for you - the Hillbilly Dueling Pistol, AKA the sawed-off shotgun. It is a standard weapon for anyone in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. In the hands of a suitable badass, it can take out anyone in a single blast. The sound of chambering a round in a pump-action sawed-off is like a catchphrase showing how awesome you are — for extra badassitude, you hold it by the slide and sort of wave it in the air, allowing the weapon's own weight to do the chambering (this is a great way to ruin your shotgun in real life, FYI). And if you have a sawed-off double barrel shotgun with dual triggers, you have the option of either unloading one barrel at a time at an opponent, or "giving 'em both barrels," as it were (also an excellent way to destroy both it and your shoulder).

In popular media, the sawed-off shotgun combines the power of a shotgun with the profile of a large handgun. It's also easy to make - all you need is a regular shotgun and a hacksaw, it seems. Its popularity easily eclipses all guns aside from the most famous, like the Desert Eagle.

In real life, sawed-off shotguns aren't very practical. Contrary to popular belief, shortening the barrel of a shotgun has little effect on the spread of the shot - the spread is actually purposely limited with a 'choke' inside the very tip of the barrel, so you'll get basically the same change whether you saw off 2 inches or 20 inches. Shortening the barrel has different effects depending on the era. Until the advent of high quality smokeless gunpowder, longer barrels on shotguns allowed for more velocity, and a sawed-off shotgun would have reduced power because of the reduced velocity. Modern powders lose extremely little velocity even when the barrel is cut down to a foot long.^note Strictly speaking, longer barrels do somewhat increase muzzle velocity because the propellant has that much longer to "push" the projectile. However, shotgun ammunition, particularly pellets, lose velocity rapidly enough that this doesn't really matter. However, the biggest problem with sawed-off shotguns is when the stock is cut down to a pistol grip, making the weapon either extremely hard to aim, or, if aimed properly, extremely likely to recoil straight into the shooter's teeth.

However in close quarters, the abilities to hide the gun until the last possible second and place it on-target without the barrel getting caught up on a close-in object like a wall are valuable. Adding onto that, sawing off the barrel and stock makes it easier to carry around, transport and hide by cutting down how much gun there is and how much weight it's packing; it's like the difference between trying to drive home with a single bag of groceries in your trunk versus a length of wood that reaches from the back of the front seat to several inches past the rear bumper, in that both technically fit, but one is a lot easier to get in or out of the trunk and the other is going to require a conscious effort to keep from bumping it against things while you're driving. So taking all that into account, the sawed-off shotgun isn't completely impractical. Although this has the unfortunate effect of making the gun a gangster's weapon fit mostly for assassins or poachers and therefore carry many legal restrictions for civilian users.

Some law enforcement agencies use compact shotguns for breaching — that is, shooting hinges and locks off doors for expedient entry. There are even shotguns designed for this that can be mounted underneath the barrel of an assault rifle, in the same way as an M203 Grenade Launcher (one of the most well-known, cut down from the Remington 870, is even rather humorously called the "Masterkey"). A sawed-off shotgun is also more easily concealed than the full-sized variety, so they are often used by criminals (bank robbers are a common example), especially in countries where normal handguns may be difficult to procure but hunting shotguns are relatively easy to buy.

This trope is very prominent in British TV shows, where the sawed-off shotgun remains the weapon of choice for the London Gangster, or the villains in any police procedural, particularly if it involves an Armed Blag. This is mainly due to the difficulty of obtaining handguns in the UK, while shotguns are still legally available to get in the UK, they're just quite a lot harder to get a hold of compared to the US. Incidentally, British English speakers prefer saying "sawn-off" shotgun (the past participle), while American English speakers say "sawed-off" shotgun instead (the past preterite), since while this sounds perfectly fine to American ears, to British ones, it sounds quite a lot like something else,^*i.e. "Sod off!", a less-nice way of saying "go away" but a less-crude way of saying "fuck off", and occasionally used as a mild insult though it still works pretty well, considering the context - who wouldn't want to get lost if one of these was pointed at them?

Finally, a minor note: as you may have realized, there's nothing particular to shotguns that only they would receive this treatment. As long as you mostly know how to do it, you can saw excess barrel off other long firearms as well. However, shotguns seem to be the most associated with the act (presumably since they tend to be cheaper to acquire in the first place and require fewer considerations for the procedure beyond "put it in a vice and grab a hacksaw" to get a firearm that is both shortened and still functional), especially double-barreled, side-by-side varieties - even now, many conflate "sawed-off shotgun" with "double-barreled shotgun", assuming that two barrels automatically means shortened ones and vice-versa. While other sawed-down weapons, mostly rifles, do appear in fiction once in a while, they have apparently not earned the kind of notoriety that would separate them from shotguns trope-wise.

Speaking of sawed-off rifles, there are two that, while not as popular or ingrained in pop culture like the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, are still quite recognizable in their own right; the "Obrez" and "Mare's Leg", cut-down versions of respectively the Mosin-Nagant rifle and Winchester lever-action rifles. Both nearly veer into Hand Cannon territory way more than sawed-off shotguns do, especially with the former depending on how short the result is.

Naturally, this trope usually overlaps with Shotguns Are Just Better and Short-Range Shotgun.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One of Shogo Kawada's many victims in his first go-round is seen with one in the manga Battle Royale.
• Beelzemon from Digimon Tamers wields two double-barreled versions before going Blast Mode. Although he still wields one in his off-hand.
• Renton Thurston in Eureka Seven AO.
• In Fist of the North Star, Jagi has a sawed-off shotgun for cheating during a fist fight.
• Gunslinger Girl. Triela's preferred long arm is a Winchester 1897 Trench Gun which she's able to fire because she's a cyborg. However just before the assault on the Belltower of St. Marks, she uses a saw to cut off the stock to make it easier to handle, and muses that she should have done it sooner.
• A pair of these are Mumei's primary weapons in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, Westernophile Kinzo has several sawed-off Winchester rifles (also known as a Mare's Leg) in his room. After the story gets going, the adults tend to start using them; Natsuhi in the first arc, Rosa in the second arc, and nearly everyone in the third.
• Similar to the previous example, in the Devilman manga, badass Ryo Asuka uses a sawed-off rifle to great effect, first scaring some bullies and later injuring Sirene.

Comic Books

• In the Batman comics, Detective (later Sheriff) Steve 'Shotgun' Smith carries one of these as his standard weapon.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Wielded by Scrooge McDuck in some Italian stories of the late '60s/early '70s and called with the Italian moniker 'lupara'. Current Italian stories have replaced the lupara with a salt-loaded blunderbuss.
• One The Punisher comic has Frank run into Wolverine with a shotgun. Frank comes out of it with a sawed-off shotgun.
• This was the weapon of choice for the Sin-Eater, of 1980's Spider-Man.

Fan Fiction

• A notorious David Gonterman fanfic features the hero Davey Crockett shooting Lord Zedd's throne with a sawn-off shotgun. Davey is on Earth at the time, and the throne is on the moon. And the throne is completely destroyed by the shot. And Lord Zedd is unharmed despite having been sitting on the throne at the time.
• Fallout: Equestria: The first weapon Littlepip acquires in her travels is a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun... which she quickly discards in favor of a submachine gun after discovering how useless it is at hitting anything beyond several feet.
• Not technically a sawed-off shotgun, but in this Judge Dredd fanfic specific mention and use is made of "carbine" versions of the Widowmaker shotgun with shorter barrels. The weapons are described as chambering the same round and having the same stopping power, but being easier to use in close quarters. Judge Cassandra Anderson also remarks that smaller weapons are easier for her and another female to handle (a point made in narration earlier in the series).

Films — Live Action

• In BloodRayne II: Deliverance, the sheriff of Deliverance has a sawed-off shotgun he calls 'Sadie'. He also talks to it. A lot.
• In The Dark Knight, the bank manager uses one in the opening scene to combat the Joker's bank robbery, and succeeds in taking out at least one of the robbers before being shot himself. The Joker acquires the gun and uses it several more times throughout the film, once killing a police officer with a point-blank shot and again when trying to penetrate the armor of a police transport. The most notable instance is when he fires it into the ceiling to disrupt a party, announcing his and his men's entrance. He then proceeds to wave it around like a toy in the face of several of the party-goers, who appropriately recoil with a lot of fear.
• In Day of the Evil Gun, Dangerous Deserter "Captain" Jefferson Addis' preferred weapon is a single barrel sawn-off shotgun. After killing him, Forbes takes the gun for himself.
• Antonio Banderas holds one on the cover to the movie Desperado, and he uses the weapon in the first major bar shootout before switching to two blazing Ruger semiautomatics for the remainder of the movie. You just know it'd be a bad move to mess with him.
  • The sawed-off also makes an appearance in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, where it has become the Mariachi's weapon of choice.
• In El Dorado Mississippi winds up with a "pistolized" shotgun after he is shown to be incredibly inept with a standard six-gun.
  Thornton: We need a gun for a man who can't shoot.
• Ash from the Evil Dead, starting in Evil Dead 2, has a sawed-off shotgun as one of his two signature weapons. He saws off the barrel himself with his other weapon, the chainsaw. In Army of Darkness, it regains a good portion of its barrel length (possibly to justify some of the distance shooting he does in the film, or because 1990s California made it much more difficult to register a shortened weapon), though a shorter-barreled prop shows up in one scene when he flips it around before holstering it.
• In Furious 7, Dom saws off a shotgun in preparation for his fight with Shaw. When they do confront each other, Shaw wields two metal sticks to which Dom mockingly asks him "You thought this was gonna be a street fight?" in reference to what Shaw said in their last encounter. However Dom proceeds to throw said shotgun back in the car and take out a wrench and pipe instead, to which he adds "You're goddamn right it is."
• The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery: Egan carries a sawn-off pump action shotgun during the bank robbery.
• Rufus Clemens weapon of choice in Hannie Caulder.
• The title character in the "Jewsploitation" film The Hebrew Hammer pulls a pair out of his coat in order to blow away a bar full of skinheads.
• Killing Them Softly: The barrels of one character's shotgun have been cut down so short◊ that they are shorter than the shells they are loaded with.
  • As a side note, one firearms review actually tested this. It works a lot better than it should, but you shouldn't risk it.
• In the 1985 version of King Solomon's Mines, Alan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) carries a trademark sawed-off double-barrel shotgun with exposed hammers.
• In The Last Rites of Ransom Pride, The Dwarf carries a pair of sawed-off double-barreled shotguns that he wields Guns Akimbo.
• Pam Bouvier carries (and uses) one in Licence to Kill.
• Used in the British gangster movie The Long Good Friday, though only the barrels are cut down, not the stock.
• Mad Max: Max uses one as his main weapon during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which he modifies himself. Similar sawed-off shotguns remain his weapon of choice across the rest of the series.
• Used by the bandit who pull off the Armed Blag at the start of Money Movers. Truth in Television as sawed-off shotguns were the weapon of choice for armed robbers in Australia in The '70s.
• Pachek's weapon of choice in The Mountie. The first shot of the movie is Pachek clapping it to Cleora's head and demanding that Grayling reveal himself.
• Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss' first step after finding out his grab-the-drug-money-and-run plan in No Country for Old Men may not go strictly according to plan is to buy a shotgun and hack off the barrel so it fits in his duffel bag. Very fitting with the grim realist nature of the movie.
• The official reason the Big Bad of the Steven Seagal movie The Patriot (1998) is arrested is for sawing the barrel off of a shotgun. This was because the authorities didn't have the evidence needed to arrest him for the criminal actions of his 'militia group', and didn't know that he had stolen a biochemical weapon and was planning to use it, but did have concrete evidence that he had made an illegal modification to a firearm.
• Reggie Bannister's signature weapon from Phantasm II onwards is a sawn off double-barreled shotgun tied to another one, creating a quad-barreled shotgun.
• In the climax of The Punisher (2004) with Thomas Jane, the titular character draws his Hillbilly Dueling Pistol after being shot several times in the chest (he had body armor on, natch). After unloading both shells into a mobster's face, he does the smart thing and throws it away (he, of course, had several other weapons on him).
• In Red Hill, Jimmy's preferred weapon is a sawn-off pump action shotgun. He usually announces his presence with a dramatic pump of the slide. This usually signals that carnage is about to ensue.
• In Rovdyr, one of the hunters carries a sawn-off double barreled shotgun, which becomes one of the more used weapons in the movies. Eventually it ends up in the hands of Camilla, who uses it to kill one of the hunters.
• In Seven (1979), Kincella uses a sawed-off double shotgun to kill Kimo and his bodyguard Skip.
• In Sweeney 2 the criminals use gold-plated Purdey shotguns stolen from a rock star. There's a notable scene where the blagger sticks his sawn-off in a bank manager's face.
  "Hold it right there, squire. You are privileged to be looking down the barrels of a gold-plated Purdey shotgun. Now as a bank manager, you'll appreciate that any man capable of cutting a gun like that in half wouldn't think twice about cutting you in half."
• Terminator:
  • Kyle Reese saws off the stock of his shotgun for concealment purposes in the first The Terminator, finishing with a nice Dramatic Gun Cock.
  • In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-800 2.4 accurately aims and fires a lever-action sawed-off shotgun single-handed while riding a motorcycle. Of course, he is a Terminator.
• In Valdez is Coming, Valdez favours a short-barrelled shotgun, the kind stagecoach guards use, as his primary weapon. He also wears a Badass Bandolier of shotgun shells across his chest.
• In Zombieland, this is the weapon of choice of Columbus throughout the film, which he sticks to due to familiarity given his high-stress. It's also a very practical weapon to survive Zombieland given the punch it packs.

Literature

• Able Team #7: Justice By Fire. Intrepid Reporter Floyd Jefferson buys a friend's shotgun and saws off the barrel when he's targeted by a Salvadorean death squad. Rather than insist he hand it over, a team member shows him the Unlocked Carry (chamber empty, safety off, action partly closed) so he doesn't accidentally blow a kid's legs off.
• In the novel version of Battle Royale, Shogo Kawada uses a sawed-off M31 Remington shotgun. In the movie, it was changed to a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun, which was designed with a shorter barrel than most guns.
• Blood Meridian: Brown, a murderous freebooter, acquires an ornate ceremonial shotgun as plunder. He goes to a village and demands that the local gunsmith saw it down. The gunsmith refuses to ruin such a work of art, causing a tense altercation until Brown finally does it himself.
• In Andrew Vachss's Burke books, the Prof favors one of these.
  "Your card is a low card, motherfucker. I see your pistol and raise you one double-barrelled scattergun."
• A pistol version is used in the James Bond novels, with Bond keeping a .38 Colt Positive with a sawn-off barrel under his pillow in Casino Royale. The Richard Chopping-designed cover of From Russia with Love features a S&W .357 Magnum with the barrel cut back to just after the ejector rod. At the time there weren't many commercial short-barreled revolvers in that calibre. Part of the triggerguard has also been removed for rapid firing (and risk of self-harm whenever Bond shoved the pistol back into his holster).
• The Dresden Files:
  • In the novel Death Masks, Karrin Murphy wields a sawed-off shotgun against the vampires and their Renfields.
  • Harry has a sawed-off shotgun in the backseat of the Blue Beetle.
• A Hero's War: Minmay's mark 2 magical guns can fire pellets in a shotgun-like spray, with a wider spread than Earth shotguns. It's eventually determined to be unnecessary complexity, though, in a gun that already has modes for fire-bolts, force-bolts, shield-penetrating bolts, bullets with magically increased momentum, grenade launching, and a bayonet.
• The Sherlock Holmes adventure The Valley of Fear featured a man who tried to kill the supposed murder victim with a sawed-off shotgun. Unfortunately for him, the victim fought back, and he ended up getting shot in the face at point-blank range as they struggled over the gun. Since the man who was killed was an agent for a larger secret society out to kill the victim, the victim decided to try and throw them off his trail by passing off the murderer's corpse as his own. With the face so horribly maimed, no one would be able to tell the difference...except Sherlock Holmes, of course.
• In the Soldiers of Barrabas series (#3: Butchers of Eden), Nile Barrabas' girlfriend Erika Dykstra is trying to persuade a Tamil businessman to leave Sri Lanka because the government is stirring up hatred against the Tamil community. The man refuses to leave, saying he's prepared to defend his family, and produces a long-barreled duck-hunting shotgun. Erika appeals to Nile for help. He responds by advising him to cut down the barrel level with the magazine. The shotgun comes in handy when the city explodes into race riots, though the shortened barrel increases the recoil and even the powerfully built Barrabas has trouble keeping it on target.
• The party in Statless and Tactless find a sawed-off shotgun that Joe quickly names "Murder-Blood the Truth-Knower" after a brief disagreement over whether or not it was used in a murder. Ian's character Mari ends up carrying it around.
• In The Tomorrow Series, a lot of tension in one scene where the group gets surprised by enemy soldiers comes not from the risk of them dying, but from the fact that the enemy soldiers are shot down almost immediately by a sawed-off shotgun that no one knew Homer was carrying.

Live-Action TV

• One UnSub from Criminal Minds used a pump shotgun to shoot at female pedestrians he pulled up next to at traffic lights. He attached a bracket to the fore-end so he could rest it on the edge of his lowered window for stability and to reload with one hand.
• This is the Mafia's mid-range weapon in the "Yakuza vs. Mafia" episode of Deadliest Warrior.
• In "The Big Shooting" episode of the 60's revival of Dragnet, a sawed-off shotgun is involved, with a spoon attached to the butt so it can be hooked into the armpit of a coat or jacket and quickly swung into firing position.
• Fargo: Season 2 has the Kitchen Brothers who use these as their weapon of choice. They attach the guns to their belt via a cord, so when not in use they let them hang at their sides, concealed under their trench coats.
• Played for laughs (like everything else) in Hogan's Heroes. When plotting how to assassinate a captured American actor who's going to do a propaganda film for the Nazis, Carter suggests a sawed-off thirty-seven millimeter cannon concealed inside a camera.
• Zoe's weapon of choice in Firefly is a sawed-off Winchester rifle called a "Mare's Leg." She has Improbable Aiming Skills with it, once shooting a gun out of a man's hand from a nearby hilltop a split-second after he'd just drawn it from another man's holster.
• In an episode of Law & Order, a racist serial killer used a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun to commit his crimes. He was eventually arrested and the shotgun was confiscated. After being released on bail, he got a second shotgun out of storage, this one a single-barrel model, and sawed off that gun's barrel as well. He never got to use it, though; his next target turned out to be carrying a handgun herself, and killed him before he could kill her.
• On Lost, Caesar finds a sawed-off shotgun at the Hydra and takes it. But when he tries to use it, Ben has already stolen it and shoots him.
• The weapon of choice for Bounty Hunter Jesse Colton in MacGyver (1985).
• Ricardo Tubbs of Miami Vice made significant use of short-barreled shotguns. In the first season, he used a standard sawed-down double-barrel model; in the second, he switched out for a custom Ithaca 37 Stakeout, an already short-barreled shotgun that was cut down even shorter, and for the third and fourth seasons he used a similarly-cut down S&W Model 3000.
• Parodied on Mock the Week, in a "Scenes We'd Like to See" segment on unlikely news broadcasts.
  Andy Parsons: The police are saying it's safe to approach the gunman, as he's sawn off the wrong end of his shotgun.
• In an episode of Night Court, a defendant claims that he only stole from someone because he had nothing to eat.
  Dan Fielding (the ADA): Yeah, he was so hungry he had to eat the shotgun he was carrying!
  Judge Harry Stone: You had a shotgun?
  Defendant: Only a little one!
  Dan: The term is "sawed-off!"
  Harry: Held over for trial (gavel).
  Defendant: There goes my security clearance!
• The Punisher (2017). When a pornographer tries to shoot Frank Castle with a double-barrel sawn-off, Frank casually disarms him and keeps the shotgun which he gives to Amy to protect herself while hiding out in a trailer. She fires it at Curtis when he approaches the door without warning. When Madani sees Amy clutching the weapon defiantly, she sarcastically asks if Amy is going to shoot her with it. Amy checks the gun and admits that she won't... because she forgot to load it. It finally gets used in action in the penultimate episode when Pilgrim tracks her down, enabling Amy to escape, and Pilgrim is later shown removing shotgun pellets from his bloody leg.
• Stranger Things: In the final episodes of season 4, the Hawkins group arms themselves with various weapons in order to try and destroy Vecna. As part of the preparations, Max watches Nancy shorten a shotgun barrel with a saw; the latter comments that what they're doing is likely a felony. In the climax, a few bullets from it are enough to toss a weakened Vecna from a window.
• The Winchesters in Supernatural use sawn-off shotguns loaded with rock salt to fight ghosts. Dean uses a double barrel Baikal IZH43 shotgun, while Sam prefers an Ithaca pump-action.
• Another gun called "Mare's Leg" is wielded by Josh Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive (Zoe's weapon in Firefly is based on it).
• In The Wire, Omar Little uses a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun hidden beneath his duster.
• The X-Files. In "Piper Maru", Agent Mulder makes inquiries at a salvage company, unaware that it's a Front Organisation for a French Secret Service operation. The audience sees the secretary has her hand on a double-barrelled shotgun attached to the underside of her desk, but fortunately she doesn't use it.
• Yancy Derringer: Beneath a blanket wrapped about his body, Pahoo-Ka-Ta-Wah carries a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun loaded with split buckshot, which he wields in emergencies.

Music

• "Hand on The Pump" by Cypress Hill on their self-titled album from 1991 is about gang life, drugs and how customized shotguns come handy in the hood.
  "Finger on the trigger with my hands upon the steel
  Lettin' out a bullet, this is goin' boo-ya
  You're stuck in my hood, so what ya gonna do now?
  Being the hunted one is no fun [...]
  Sawed off shotgun, hand on the pump
  Left hand on a forty, [puffin onna blunt]"
• Ice Cube claims to make use of one in "Straight Outta Compton".
  "When I'm called off, I got a sawed-off
  Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off"
• Volume-10's single "Pistolgrip-Pump" (later covered by Rage Against the Machine) is from a gangster's perspective who keeps a sawed-off shotgun on his lap at all times, presumably while driving through the hood.

Tabletop Games

• The BattleTech RPG has the pistol version of the Blazer Laser Rifle, with the same power but much shorter. Unsuprisingly, this renders it illegal in much of the Inner Sphere.
• The Champions supplement Kingdom of Champions has a villain named Brown Fox. The book notes that “brown fox” is (actually rare) British underworld slang for a sawed-off shotgun, and yes, the character uses such a weapon.
• d20 Modern: the lead equipment designer for that game has admitted a personal distaste for this trope. Shotguns are markedly inferior to assault rifles or submachineguns, and sawed-off models hold no particular advantage.
• In GURPS sawed-off shotguns are just slightly lighter and easier to use in close combat. The stock can also be sawed off but that just makes it hard to fire.
• In the 1st and 2nd Editions of Necromunda the type of shotgun a gang fighter used was merely cosmetic but 3rd Edition introduced different stat lines for the different types of shotgun. The 3rd Edition sawn-off shotgun, available to Orlock starting gangs and as a Common Item at the Campaign Trading Post, lacks the various ammo types of a regular shotgun but, due to the improvised nature of its ammo, automatically passes ammo rolls.
• In the first and second editions of White Wolf's Old World of Darkness games, the only difference between a sawed-off and a regular shotgun is that the former is easier to conceal.
• Shadowrun
  • The Remington Roomsweeper, a shotgun the size of a heavy pistol or a heavy pistol that uses shotgun rules, depending on who you ask, which features an adjustable "choke" that allows it to substitute quite handily for a full-length shotgun (though with reduced range). It's probably the second most common weapon amongst Shadowrunners, right behind the Ares Predator handgun.
  • As well as these the game now (as of 5th edition) features a sawed-off, or rather a short barrelled version, of the Defiance T-250 shotgun. The Defiance may not have the best stats but it still packs a decent punch is the standard cheap, versatile and street legal shotgun option. The short barrel option cuts down on range and a little on hitting power (putting it on par with the most damaging pistols) while making the weapon something that could be feasibly hidden. To do so successfully you'll want clothing that makes this work (the lined coat for instance is a trenchcoat that actually gives you a bonus to this) as well as a few points in the palming skill, but if you can pull it off it's a good way to scare the heck out of someone and ruin their neat plans they had for your defeat.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has Quadborrel Dragon, a dragon with not one, but two sawed-off shotguns on its arms.

Toys

• The NERF N-Strike Barrel Break IX-2 is a reverse-plunger'd double-barreled breech-action short-barreled shotgun of a dart blaster. It even has a Tactical Rail-mounted dart rack to hold more ammo! Some modders merely shorten the barrel a little more, while others go farther and minimize it extensively.
  • A 2013 subline, the Nerf Zombie Strike series, features another short-barreled shotgun blaster, the Sledgefire Shotgun. It can chamber and fire 3 darts at once with specially-designed shotshells, and is a break-action blaster like the Barrel Break.
  • Their competitor, Buzzbee, also has a Double Shot blaster, which is a slimmer double-barreled shotty with individual "shells" that you load the darts into before loading them up. While it is not sawn-off in its stock form, many modders will indeed saw off the barrels so they don't slow down the darts (due to how plunger-driven dart blasters work, too long a barrel in some kinds of blasters will actually reduce their range and power).

Video Games

• 7 Days to Die initially had a sawed-off pump shotgun, with more damage than the regular pump shotgun but higher spread and inability to load slugs. In Alpha 17, it was removed from the game and replaced by the double-barreled shotgun, an easily-found sawed-off with wide spread and able to fire two shots in quick sucession. The regular pump shotgun can receive a sawed-off barrel mod for wider spread as well.
• Alliance of Valiant Arms has the Winchester M1887S which has a sawed-off barrel and stock. The weapon is a clear Shout-Out to the one used in Terminator 2: Judgment Day; the Player Character even flip-cocks it between shots.
• Ashes 2063 features the sawed-off shotgun as an alternative to the pump shotgun, which itself has its stock sawed off. Contrary to the usual example, the sawed-off deals slightly less damage per shell than the pump; its real selling point is that you can deliver two shells in very quick sequence to get a mutant or tougher raider out of your face in an instant, and despite the power loss, one shell from the sawed-off can still put down most basic enemies just fine. Like all weapons, in Afterglow the sawed-off has two workbench upgrades: the first adds a third barrel, and the second improves its recoil handling by re-adding a folding stock.
• Battlefield:
  • Battlefield Hardline has the sawed-off shotgun, which is exclusive for the robber faction.
  • Battlefield 1 also has the sawed-off shotgun, initially only available to the Pilot class (a class you are automatically using when choosing to spawn driving a vehicle) for when they abandon their vehicles, and the Tank Hunter 'Elite' class which can be found and equipped, as their only short-range weapon due to the fact their BFG can only be used while braced against something. The sawed-off shotgun was later made available to the Assault class, and is also available with the Infiltrator 'Elite' class, introduced in the Turning Tides DLC.
• Played dead straight with the damage upgrade to BioShock 2's shotgun; the game literally says sawing off the barrel makes it deal more damage.
• Bayonetta features the titular character able to Dual Wield a pair of magic sawed-off shotguns called the Onyx Roses on her hands or her feet. They were crafted by the Fallen Angel weaponsmith Rodin, with their unlimited ammo fueled by the souls of demonic fairies.
• Blood has an unusually accurate example as one of the most common available weapons. Blood II: The Chosen nerfs it with slower firing and reload speeds, worse accuracy, and rarer ammo (mostly by way of not letting enemies use it until the expansion). Even so, it has a greater damage-per-shot rate than the Auto Shotgun introduced in The Nightmare Levels, Caleb can carry more shells than in the first game, and using two at a time simply requires you to find a second one at the end of the first chapter rather than a limited-time powerup.
• In Bloodborne, the Labyrinth Watcher carrying a crowbar and a lantern has these. should you keep a distance from them, they switch to the sawed-off shotgun and fire solid slugs towards you. Prior to release, sawed off shotguns could actually be wielded by the player, as seen in Project Beast. It was replaced by the Hunter Blunderbuss, presumably to match the steampunk aesthetic.
• In BloodRayne, a sawed-off shotgun is used in the Louisiana levels. Interestingly, for a Dhampir who is super humanly strong and can dual-wield assault rifles, she fires the sawed-off realistically.
• In Buckshot Roulette, both the player and the dealer have the option of invoking this trope in order to deal double damage by using the handsaw, granted that there's a live shell in there. After the turn in which the shotgun is sawn off, the barrel magically reappears.
• Call of Duty:
  • A sawed-off double-barreled shotgun makes a rather surprising appearance in Call of Duty: World at War, as a one-time pickup in campaign mode (found in an abandoned insane asylum of all places). The regular double-barreled shotgun can also be sawed-down in multiplayer with a unique attachment (replacing the bayonet the Trench Gun can get).
  • A further-sawed-down Sears Ranger returned in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, with the added bonus of allowing the player to carry two at once (that is, of course, if accuracy doesn't concern you much - the spread is so wide with dual Rangers that they stop being effective even before they disappear at their arbitrarily-short max range). Modern Warfare 2 also sports a sawed-off Winchester 1887 made as a replication of the Terminator 2: Judgment Day model, complete with flip-to-reload if you dual wield. For the longest time, these sawed-off Model 1887s were horribly broken, and they're still a surefire sign of an unrepentant puppy rapist. There's also the KAC "Masterkey" shotgun (see Real Life), which can be unlocked to attach to your assault rifles. Not that anyone ever uses the Masterkey.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops features the Ithaca 37 Stakeout, which is interestingly the only pump-action shotgun in the multiplayer - and thus, given how the series usually balances shotguns, means that it reaches farther and deals more damage than the otherwise-superior semi-auto SPAS-12.
  • Call of Duty: WWII features another double-barreled shotgun, once again sawed off by default like the Ranger to make it a close-range counterpart to the triple-barreled M30 Luftwaffe Drilling combination shotgun/rifle.
  • Call of Duty: Vanguard has a full-length shotgun with external hammers, which naturally includes attachment options to shorten the barrel and saw off the stock, and in the tradition of the MW2 Ranger, it is also the only non-pistol weapon that can be used akimbo.
• Crimsonland has a sawed-off shotgun available, which has significantly more spread than a regular shotgun.
• The Darkness II has a few shotgun types, one of which being a "Sawn-Off", a pump-action with a cut down barrel (which somehow holds more shells than the full-length Defender shotgun?). A more archetypal example comes in the Vendetta campaign, where gunslinger Shoshanna, whose Dark weapon is a double barreled sawed-off shotgun with unlimited ammo and can hold up to 6 shots, which can be changed into a huge cannon blast. Under most circumstances, however, she wields it on her left hand as a shotgun, along with any sidearm in her right hand.
• Deus Ex features a sawed-off shotgun, which fires slowly but is slightly more powerful and takes up less inventory space than the automatic shotgun. The way the game handles weapon skills also allows you to completely avoid the "shorter barrels = shorter range" effect; indeed, if you get to Master level, all the pellets hit in the same spot - making the sawed-off shotgun the ultimate precision rifle from hell.
• A similar weapon appears in the prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution as well, as a pre-order bonus. It has excellent stopping power against most enemies, but its reach is predictably ridiculous and only has two shots. The weapon skills finally making sense, it's also impossible to use it in a precise way. Its greatest advantage is how little space it takes in the inventory compared to every other non-handgun.
• Dante of Devil May Cry has used, along with his trademark guns Ebony and Ivory, a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun in every game, finally given the name "Coyote-A" in Devil May Cry 4. The same game also has concept art that explains why a double-barreled break-action doesn't need to be reloaded frequently with every shot thanks to having its own magazine (and Dante's demon powers refilling it automatically). If you upgrade your Gunslinger style enough, he can also use his shotgun like a lead-slinging nunchaku, or do the Gunslinger's version of his Stinger move, which has the added benefit of adding some extra damage by pulling the trigger after thrusting it into an enemy and then blasting them away.
• Doom:
  • Doom II introduces the super shotgun, which is a sawed-off shotgun with a big punch. It deals the damage of three regular shotgun shells while only consuming two, making it almost as powerful as a rocket when fired at extremely-close range, but is much less precise and takes twice as long to reload as the regular shotgun. Doom 64 does away with the reloading animation due to cartridge memory constraints and simply has Doomguy pump it like the standard shotgun, which means you can fire it faster. Interestingly, in contrast to many later sawed-off shotguns, going by the in-world sprite only the barrels are shortened, while the stock is left intact.
  • Doom³ brings back the super shotgun in the Resurrection of Evil expansion. Unlike most examples of this trope in video games, it actually has better range than the standard shotgun, which is practically useless outside of punching range.
  • Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal once again feature the super shotgun as a stronger but less accurate alternative to the regular shotgun. Eternal gives it the Meat Hook upgrade, which is a grappling hook that pulls the player towards any demon it latches on to.
• The Evil Within 2 has a sawed off Ithaca 37 which serves as Sebastian's primary shotgun. However, there are two additional variants of this particular shotgun that can be obtained if you decide to go through the trouble of retrieving them. The first is the full-barreled shotgun; found in a locked shack in Chapter 6, the full-barreled shotgun is superior to its sawed off counterpart by virtue of having better range without affecting its damage output. The second is the sawed off double barreled shotgun; awarded after fully completing Skyes' sidequest, the sawed off double barreled shotgun is the most powerful of the three shotguns but also the most impractical due to its rapid firing rate and, of course, low capacity.
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has the Betty Boom sawed-off shotgun. It's wildly inaccurate and lacks the room-clearing abilities of its automatic shotgun rivals, but it has the advantage of fitting into a hip slot (normally reserved for pistols and small SMGs), weighing next-to-nothing, and it has a sweet crucifix iron sight.
• Fallout
  • Played straight in Fallout and 2. The first game even gives you a sawed-off rifle as a quest reward, although the sawing is just one of the modifications - the result is to all effects a revolver firing .223 cartridges, and is the most powerful small arm in the game, even more than the Desert Eagle. Amusingly, it also appears completely unchanged in the sequel as a Random Drop from raiders - meaning that you can accumulate several of these "One-of-a-kind weapon(s), obviously made with care and skill." The sequel also starts recruitable character Cassidy off with a sawed-off double barrel shotgun. Played straight in that it somehow deals more damage than a regular shotgun, though the range is reduced.
  • The sawed off shotgun in Fallout 3 is quite weaker than any other shotgun in the game. It's also highly inaccurate, but as it's very very short, that may be why. The spread is all over the place, making it worthless except for large enemies, or being within kissing distance. Its unique counterpart, The Kneecapper, while suffering the same accuracy issues as other sawed-off shotguns, has over double the firepower and is uniquely suited for Small Guns-focused characters who are interested in cleaning out ghoul-infested tunnels, close-range ambushes, and/or ammo conservation.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the sawed-off is a holdout weapon, which you can bring into most casinos, just in case you really need to kill dudes in there. The unique Big Boomer does the highest non-explosive, non-energy damage in the game. And the kicker? It can be acquired as early as the fourth town. Provided you know how to get it without hurting its owner, it can be gotten very easily. And it's also right next to an important quest location that involves intense fighting at close quarters. Have fun!
• Far Cry 2 features two with its "Fortunes Pack" DLC, one traditional (though heavily ornate) double-barreled shotgun for the secondary slot, and a slightly larger pump-action one with a large suppressor for the primary slot. Far Cry 4 followed suit with two of these for the sidearm slot: the "D2", a sawed-down variant of the .700 Nitro double rifle converted to fire shotshells, and a Signature version of the 1887 with shortened barrel and stock, which (owing to being an 1887 in a video game) is flip-cocked like the one in Terminator 2 when used from a vehicle, while carrying a body, or any other situation where only sidearms can be used. Far Cry 5 features a return of the "D2", now properly based on an actual sawed-off double-barrel shotgun rather than a sawed-off double rifle with retextured ammo.
• Rufus Shinra's weapon of choice in Final Fantasy VII.
• The Finals has the SH1900 double-barrel shotgun. Its devastating power at point-blank range is offset by its equally devastating recoil and low effective range.
• The Gears of War series has always involved heavy abuse of its shotgun, and the third game has a new sawed-off, double-barreled variety. The sawn-off is obscenely powerful but has insane spread, abysmal range and a long reload, even when active reloading. It's effectively a melee weapon, hence its nickname the "Bad Touch".
• The Near-Sighted Assassin from Ghost Trick uses one. Lynne even comments on how he's probably just trying to enforce the Rule of Cool by doing so, given that it's also a blinged-out lever-action weapon that really has no excuse for being used for an assassination.
• The SLY 2020 from GoldenEye (2010) is one, and is the only shotgun in the game to be this. It's the most powerful shotgun in the game, has good range and uses a magazine as opposed to the other pump shotguns using individual shells. The downsides to it however, is that its accuracy is lower than the other shotguns due to it being sawn off, its magazine capacity is the lowest with 7 (though the use of High-Cap Mag extends the SLY's magazine size to 9 rounds) and it has no iron sights.
• The Grand Theft Auto series often includes a sawed-off shotgun, with the advantage of greater spread and no real reduction in power versus the basic shotgun.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, not only can sawed-off shotguns be wielded like pistols, but CJ can use two at once at Hitman proficiency. Best not to think about how he reloads.
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, your character can use a double-barreled sawed-off one-handed while riding a motorcycle.
  • It returns in Grand Theft Auto V as a pump-action, and is still bike-compatible, and now bus-compatible as well, for some reason. It has the highest damage per pellet of all shotguns but very poor range and wider-than-average spread. Grand Theft Auto Online also added the Double-Barreled Shotgun, which works almost identically to The Lost And Damned version, but but shoots both barrels in quick sequence with one trigger pull.
• Gunfire Reborn has a number of cut down shotguns.
  • The Wild Hunt shotgun, a cartoony double barreled shotgun that looks to have been deliberately cut down; both the barrels and the stock feature brass fits which are a bit out of place compared to the rest of the gun, heavily implying that they are covering cut-down marks. Assuming normal weapon proportions, an un-sawed version would be about as tall as any of the protagonists. Don't mistake 'small' for 'weak' though—the Wild Hunt can produce an apocalyptic 1,920 damage in its two-shot magazine at level 0.
  • The Porcupine is a less common weapon than the Wild Hunt, but still appears to be heavily trimmed down, notably missing trigger guard and foregrip. Also unlike other weapons, the primary fire is more like a needle grenade—the secondary fire detonates the 'grenade' in the barrel and turns it into a searing blast of painful needles that will pepper everything in front of it...up til about two eters away.

• Due to being a "Virtual Reality gun range simulator", naturally Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades has quite a lot of shotguns with short barrels on offer for the player to mess around with. Thanks to the game being VR the player also doesn't have to worry about personal safety nor the disadvantages of said shotguns. At least until they play Take & Hold, the combat mode where the player squares off against armed Sosigs.
• Jagged Alliance 2 features the pump-action Serbu Super-Shorty◊, which comes factory-manufactured as a super-sized handgun. The description invokes the trope by noting that it saves time-consuming hacksaw work. They are usually regarded as Awesome, but Impractical as backup weapons since smaller, lighter handguns like the FN Five-SeveN are much faster to draw and fire; most use of the weapon is in conjunction with the v1.13 mod, which allows players to load them with a clip of lockbuster rounds as an instant lockpick.
• Killzone 3 brings us the VC8 shotgun pistol, which as its name suggests, is a tri-barreled shotgun shrunken down to pistol size.
• In The Last of Us, Joel finds a sawed off shotgun called the "Shorty", which is classified as a handgun in the game's inventory system. And in the sequel, Ellie can find a sawed off Remington 870, though it simply serves as a basic shotgun.
• Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, a game heavily inspired by gangster films, features this weapon prominently. Especially in the mission where you are given the lupara to take out the traitorous informant.
• These sort of appear in Marathon 2 and Infinity. Sort of, because "sawed-off" indicates that they were once full-size shotguns, and these seem to have been originally manufactured at this size. And they can be used Guns Akimbo in a fashion akin to the Terminator 2 example above. It even lampshades the "flip it around to reload" maneuver.
• Mass Effect 3:
  • The asari-made Disciple shotgun serves such a purpose: it's easy on the pack load, but still performs adequately as a shotgun. It's useful for players that want to predominantly use powers instead of guns but still have a heavier small arms weapon (as pack weight affects cooldown rates of the special powers).
  • The more recently released AT-12 Raider shotgun hews even closer to a sawed-off: it deals high damage, but holds only two rounds, has insane spread and reloads slowly.
• Oddly, for a game that's largely an enormous mass of action movie tropes and badass, Max Payne handles its sawed-off shotgun comparatively realistically. You can't fire both barrels at once, it only holds two shots, and although devastating at extreme close range, it's much less useful than your standard pump-action at longer ranges. The primary mistake is that he uses it one-handed. The primary advantage of the sawed-off shotgun is that, by abusing the game mechanics, you can shoot-dodge into a group of enemies, blast one or two, then immediately shoot-dodge again to reload immediately. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne "fixes" this by removing the reload aspect from shoot-dodges, but you can still reload incredibly quickly by doing the fancy-looking bullet time reloads. The True Matrix Mod adds Sawed Off Shotgun Akimbo as a weapon option once you pick up a second one. It doubles the capacity of a normal one, making it a four-shot weapon.
• Metal Gear:
  • Justified in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, where the shotguns were shortened specifically for use in the jungle environments in which the game takes place.
  • Even if he's prematurely aged into an old man, Solid Snake is capable of shooting a sawed-off one-handed in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
  • Zig-zagged in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The double barrel starts off as a normal shotgun and gets the barrel shortened and the stock removed through research. The M37 starts as a sawed-off; research adds a longer barrel and a stock.
• The Duplet in Metro 2033 is a side-by-side break-action sawed off shotgun, built from pieces of metal piping and train parts. It does huge amounts of damage per shell — the most of all shotguns, in fact — and a double-barreled discharge is a devastating attack that nothing bar a boss can take and remain standing, but it generally gets dropped for the more easy-to-use Uboinik/Shambler revolving shotguns which have the advantage of a Pistol Whip or Bayonet Ya attack (although a depth-of-vision glitch impedes you from checking the watch with the Uboinik equipped). The Duplet returns in Metro: Last Light with customization, such as extended barrels for longer range, or even two extra barrels, whereupon each trigger pull is a dual barrel blast and Secondary Fire spits out a mighty wall of lead, at the cost of longer reload times.
• PAYDAY series:
  • PAYDAY: The Heist features the Serbu Super-Shorty as the Locomotive 12G. Compared to the game's other shotgun, it has paltry range but a very fast fire rate, and its puny magazine size (four shells) can be upgraded by two. Plus, being such a small weapon, it's treated by the game as a secondary, allowing you to take an assault rifle alongside it for other situations.
  • PAYDAY 2 has not only the returning Locomotive 12G, but played fully straight with the Mosconi 12G, a traditional double-barrel shotgun. The only modification options for it are to saw down the barrel and the majority of the stock, making the gun almost hilariously inaccurate and impossible to control even for its meager 2 shots, but making it incredibly easy to conceal. However, as it can't be silenced, it's rarely used in any capacity, especially since the aforementioned Locomotive does everything it does, with more ammo, higher concealment values, and the ability to be silenced... still as a secondary, while the Mosconi takes up your primary weapon slot. It's mostly good for players who want something with high power and high concealment for Dodge builds. Most other shotguns added later through patches or DLC include alternate barrel lengths as well, almost always including at least a shortened variation, particularly the later Claire 12G, another double-barreled shotgun, this time with exposed hammers, as a secondary-weapon counterpart to the Mosconi.
• Planet Alcatraz has 4 different types of sawed off shotguns (Juda, Greetings, Friend, Best Friend), both single- and double-barrelled, chambered in 12 gauge and 16 gauge. There's even a perk that improves accuracy when you use one of these.
• Postal 2 as of its rerelease on digital storefronts has one, ported from the "Eternal Damnation" Game Mod. It's one of the few weapons in the game which has to reload, requiring the user to do so after every two shots. It also has ridiculously wide spread, but makes up for it with similarly-ridiculous damage per pellet - the range at which you'll instantly kill not only your target but everyone in the same time zone as him is noticeably further than that of the regular pump shotgun, followed by a very short margin before you reach the range at which you'll barely nick a target with one or two pellets.
• Craftable in Project Zomboid. Take a regular shotgun, take a saw to it, get the sawed-off shotgun. Damage and range go down, but so does the shotgun's considerable weight, and the death arc gets wider too. For a long while the game was also notable for only giving this treatment to a regular single-barreled, pump-action shotgun, though this was eventually followed by the addition of a double-barreled shotgun in 2019 and then the ability to saw its barrels down as well a year later.
• Red Dead Redemption features the sawed-off shotgun as the first shotgun type weapon you can get. It has pretty horrible range, but against mountain lions, there's no better weapon until you get the longer-barreled coachgun.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: A sawed-off shotgun is the second firearm you get in the game, after the pistol, and it takes up the pistol slot in the character's inventory. It's short-ranged and powerful, but only has two shots before reloading.
• Resident Evil 5 has the Hydra, a three barreled sawed-off break-action shotgun. Little magazine and long reload time, yes, but also the power to shred anything in front of it. Characters hold it with one extended arm (except Sheva, who holds it with both hands), though it's understandable considering the sheer bulk of Chris and the Super-Strength of Wesker.
• Ryouko wields one of these in Saya no Uta. It's played realistically, though, and the character has trouble with the weapon due to insufficient knowledge of how to care for the shells properly.
• Oda Nobunaga in Sengoku Basara uses one in conjunction with a longsword as part of a Sword and Gun combo. Unlike many other sawed-offs, its disadvantages are completely averted by the fact that it can fire dark spheres of hatred.
• Silent Hill has an extremely odd one. It looks like a standard sawn-off double-barreled coach gun, but it holds six rounds, which it fires semi-automatically and fairly fast on top of that. If it wasn't for the short range and the very limited ammo boxes you can find for it, it would easily be a Game-Breaker.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has several shotguns, but for about the first third of the game you only get a sawn-off TOZ-66 coach gun. It starts well as a decent short-range weapon, and it's your best defense against most mutants, but the fact that it's handled realistically^*no lightning-fast reloads with both shells in one hand, no opening or closing the breech with just a jerk of the wrist, and both hammers have to be manually cocked once it's loaded up makes it a pain to use during firefights and on anything requiring more than two shots to go down. Since such enemies come around pretty early, especially in a vanilla experience, it's easy to come to hate the sawed-off as you constantly reload it slowly, getting shot full of holes in the meantime. The shotties that are actually good all around avert the trope – even the relatively short Maverick 88 isn't sawed-off, just short-barreled.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Scoundrel's secondary weapon is a short scattergun they can draw and fire one-handed.
• Team Fortress 2
  • The Scattergun, a shortened double-barreled lever action, is the Scout class' weapon of choice: Scouts being the fastest and most vulnerable class in the game, Scout players are expected to get close to their enemies, fire, and make a hasty retreat before the target gets a chance to retaliate - provided that he survives. The damage mechanics back up this philosophy: while normally weapons (including shotguns) ramp up damage at close range up to 150%, the Scattergun goes up to 175%.
  • The unlockable "Force-a-Nature" shotgun is a sawed-off par excellence - double-barreled, cut down to just past the foregrip, and capable of unloading both barrels in a fraction of a second. The tradeoff is that you only get two shots before having to reload.
  • The later Soda Popper is sawed off even farther than that; it's barely longer than the soda can that replaced its foregrip.
  • Also, the stock Shotgun available to the Engineer, Soldier, Heavy and Pyro classes is sawed off at the grip (no stock), much like the picture on top of this page, though the Engie and Heavy also have access to unlockable full-sized shotguns with different strengths and weaknesses.^note The Engineer's "Frontier Justice" holds half as many shells and deals boosted damage based on "revenge crits" stored up by making kills with the user's sentry gun once it's destroyed instead of getting random crits. The Heavy's "Family Business" holds two more shells than the standard one, but in return deals slightly less damage per shot.
• Played completely straight in the ridiculously goofy and full of More Dakka TimeSplitters series. Strangely, only the double-barreled sawed-off variant may be used akimbo in the series. And it reloads the same as any other bullet weapon, dropping of the screen then coming right back as if you merely had to exchange shell clips. It is far superior to the automatic merely for this reason. Of course, the game itself is full of silly tropes taken to their extremes.
• The Twisted Metal reboot has this as a sidearm and a bigger one as a weapon pickup. The former is near useless when not used in extreme close range and can either unload both shells at once for massive damage or just one shell and use the other when appropriate. Did I mention that you have unlimited ammo for it? On the other, there's nothing special for the latter, except being a lot stronger obviously. Both weapons are potentially among the strongest weapons in the game.
• Warframe has the Tigris shotgun, which fires both barrels with a click of the fire button and packs a hell of a punch even at a fair range. The Prime variant is largely considered to be the most powerful shotgun in the game.
• Gallows, the Squishy Wizard in the body of The Big Guy from Wild ARMs 3 uses one, though he's the worst attacker of the party, the weapon itself is the weakest ARM of the game, and his aim is terrible. On the other hand, when he manages to land a critical hit, it's going to hurt.
• In Wolfenstein: The Old Blood B.J. saws off a shotgun himself after finding it with the front of the barrel bent out of shape.
• The sawn-off in You Are Empty is damn useful - for the first enemy or two. Then, the slow reload causes everybody who hasn't croaked from the first two shots to demonstrate their extreme displeasure about the player's presence by severely increasing the amount of lead in his bloodstream. The game, however, has no other shotguns, so most players prefer to use the more universal machine gun or nailgun.

Web Animation

• Sun Wukong in RWBY uses a staff that separates into nunchucks that contain short-barreled shotguns inside them.

Webcomics

• Local plumber and all-around handy man Lou from Dead Winter, grabs himself a double-barreled shotgun in the over and under configuration during the OmniMart arc of the comic. While doing his usual tinkering, he also saws them down to make them easier to carry in a large holster compared to their full-length.
• Schlock Mercenary referenced this trope in the "Sawn-off Schlockgun" arc, with Schlock sawing-down two multi-cannons and being told that they were now a danger to everyone around him, since he'd removed the regulators and cooling systems. When they were repaired, he kept the look for the sheer intimidation value, since just holding them made it obvious he was a maniac - the first person he showed his new toys to commented that with them in that state he'd have felt more safe if Schlock had grenades strapped to his chest.
• In S.S.D.D. Norman owns a sawn-off double-barrel. When his partner in crime insists on standing behind him when he shoots that thing he assures him that it's loaded with slugs, not shot.
  Gary: So what do you hunt with slugs?
  Norm: Small cars.

Web Original

• mikeburnfire: Discussed during one of Zach's many tangents about guns in the episode 271 of the New Vegas series, collected in the second Gun Rants compilation. Mike claims his third-favourite handgun is the Mosin-Nagant and when pressed claims he meant the sawed-off version. He's later seen wielding said gun.
  Zach: The barrel has been cut down to 4 inches long and they completely removed the stock so you're now shooting 7.62x54R which is like, 5 inches long,^note just above 3 inches, actually you're shooting that out of something that has like a 4 inch barrel, so it's just a fireball the size of you coming out of the end of the gun.
  Mike: Who needs shoulders?
• A sawed off shotgun appears in version three of Survival of the Fittest.
• Bruno, from the completed short-story serial Vatsy and Bruno, wields a double-barreled variety of this.

Web Video

• While the laws of physics are already enough to debunk the myth that sawing down a shotgun's barrel makes it more powerful, this video from Kentucky Ballistics tests out multiple shotguns of different barrel lengths at different distances. The results at point-blank range show that a pistol-length 12-gauge loaded with 00 buckshot will cause a nasty, gaping wound in a ballistic gel zombie torso, but is unlikely to penetrate completely. An 18" barreled pump gun went deeper but left only a small exit wound from a few pellets punching through, while a 10-gauge goose-hunting shotgun with a barrel close to four feet in length blasted a large hole all the way through the torso and took a large chunk out the back with it, demonstrating that cutting a shotgun down doesn't Nerf it too drastically, but it does sacrifice a lot of muzzle energy, and therefore has less destructive power compared to a longer-length barrel. Just for fun, he used the goose gun on the zombie torso's skull afterward; the entire upper half was completely blown off in a shower of green goo and synthetic bone chips. You know you wanna see it.

Western Animation

• Archer uses one in the second season episode "White Lightning" that he "borrowed" from Wodehouse, who used two to protect Malory in "Double Duece". It pops up every now and again, notably as an instrument in his family feud game with the Irish Mob.
• The Simpsons has a few instances where a character wields a sawed-off shotgun.
  • In the episode where Mr. Burns is trying to kill Grandpa to get the Hellfish Bonanza, an assassin bursts into the retirement home spraying machine gun bullets everywhere. A nurse retaliates with this weapon.
  Our residents! [BOOM] Are trying! [BOOM] To nap! [BOOM]
  • When Mr. Burns takes on Bart as his heir, Homer tries to get him back. In a deleted scene, shown on a clip show special, instead of releasing the hounds (or the bees, or the hounds with bees in their mouths so when the bark they shoot bees at you) Burns chooses to release the Robotic Richard Simmons. It chases off Homer, but continues to antagonize Mr. Burns. Smithers attempts to take it out with a sawed-off shotgun blast to the face, but it reforms a la Terminator T-1000. The shotgun itself, and Smithers hiding it in his jacket, is a reference to The Terminator as well.

Real Life

• Sawed-off shotguns were used extensively in trench warfare during the first World War by the United States; according to the other wiki, one Sergeant in particular managed to single-handedly retake a French town from German control using only such a shotgun. The Germans considered the use of shotguns a war crime, trying to force American soldiers to stop using them^note Mostly due to Values Dissonance; German officers, who were mostly aristocrats, thought the shotgun to be a weapon suited only to hunt animals, so they took the enemy killing their soldiers with a shotgun as an act of equating them with animals and even declaring that they'd execute any soldiers captured who used one. They never went through with it, supposedly in part because of America's response (noting that the side that deployed gas weapons and flamethrowers really didn't have a leg to stand on to take the moral high ground over what weapons their enemies used, they threatened to just execute any German POWs they took if any of their own were executed over using a shotgun) and mostly because the war ended before Germany ever got the chance to carry out their threat.
• During the trench warfare of the Gallipoli Campaign, Major Stephen Midgley of the Australian 5th Light Horse Regiment was widely known to use a sawn-off double barrelled shotgun while leading his troops, the weapon's effectiveness resulting in Turkish officers complaining that it was not a 'weapon of war' under international law after Midgley took one Turkish soldier's head "clean off his shoulders". Midgley was ordered by an Australian general to cease using his shotgun and switch to a conventional rifle and bayonet, to which the Major was "bitterly peeved".
• A sawed-off shotgun was the weapon of choice of Clyde Barrow. It hung from a strap around his shoulder so that he could easily conceal it under his coat, and quickly raise it up into a firing position.
• Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried sawed-off shotguns during the Columbine High School massacre. Harris for one likened the shotguns to the ones shown in Doom, which led to outrage and (sensationalist) headlines accusing Doom and many others of corrupting youth.
• This isn't always a modification, the Ithaca Auto & Burglar (1922) was a known as a "factory-built sawed-off shotgun" and aimed at police forces. Er...make that sold to police forces.
• Breaching shotguns often have a shorter barrel for ease of wielding and are made for destroying door locks, usually by using powdered lead rather than shot.
• In Sicily, the sawed-off shotgun is called a lupara ("for the wolf"—it was originally a personal defense weapon of shepherds), and is infamous for its use in vendettas and by The Mafia. They feature heavily in Mario Puzo's The Godfather.
• In Soviet times, both during WWII and some time after, sawn-off shotguns and Mosin-Nagant rifles were used by bandits, robbers and/or Red Army deserters for ease of concealment. From Zygmunt Frankel's Siberian Diary:
  There was, however, official confirmation of the worst and most vicious kind of banditry. From time to time, a printed leaflet with a man's photograph would be pasted on the walls, stating that so and so, a deserter from the army, had been apprehended, found guilty of desertion and armed robbery, condemned to death, and executed. If a soldier at or near the front was found merely separated from his unit without a really convincing explanation like written orders or testimony from his commander if the commander could be contacted in time, he would be court-martialled and shot the same day. The deserters who managed to get away from the front with their weapons - a rifle could be made compact by sawing off the butt and most of the barrel - had nothing to lose by adding robbery to their desertion
• Thanks to the highly vegetated jungle environment during The Vietnam War, pretty much everything from shotguns to grenade launchers have had their barrel sawed off at some point to ease maneuvers. Special mention goes to the "Bitch Gun", a weapon used by the SASR, which is basically an SLR (a semi-auto FN FAL used by the Commonwealth nations for much of the Cold War, for those uninformed) with everything in front of the gas block sawed off and the bipod detached to make room for an under-barrel XM148 grenade launcher.
• Already back around 1600 cavalry would often be armed with large pistols, loaded with several small pellets or with "buck and ball", a combination of that and a single muzzle sized ball. Both in looks and in effect, these pistols were a lot like sawn off shotguns.
• The Mossberg Shockwave is a pump-action gun with a 14-inch factory barrel, and is not considered a Class 3/NFA gun in that configuration, meaning it does not require a federal tax stamp (a shotgun is defined by the NFA as a "shoulder-fired" smoothbore weapon, and the Shockwave rolls off the assembly line with a pistol grip long enough to bring it up to the 26-inch minimum length). Of course, it still might not be compliant with some states' gun laws, and it only skates by the ATF's rules in that specific configuration; putting any other type of rear stock on one without first swapping out for a longer barrel will turn it into a Class 3 weapon. Remington later followed suit with their own factory-built sawed-off shotgun, the TAC-14.
• The Taurus Judge is a revolver that can chamber 410 shot shells, supposedly named for a Florida judge who used one for self-defense. It's reportedly Taurus' best-selling revolver but most gun enthusiasts agree that it's Awesome, but Impractical.

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