The Shotgun Goes to War: Pump Guns, Auto-Loaders and Combat Shotguns from the Winchester 1897 to the Benelli M4

The Model 1897 was developed by John Browning and Matthew Browning from the earlier Model 1893 and built by Winchester from 1897 until 1957, with more than one million made. It was listed for sale in the November 1897 catalog as a 12 gauge solid frame, and its external hammer and tubular magazine mark it as an early pump gun. The atlas records that American military personnel and law enforcement officers used it alongside civilian hunters, and that the Army and Marine Corps used it again in the Second World War.

Another John Browning design, built by Fabrique Nationale de Herstal from 1902 and the first successful semi-automatic shotgun. Its recoil-operated action and name came from its five-round capacity, four in the magazine and one in the chamber. It stayed in production until 1998, and Remington and Savage later sold nearly identical variants, which shows how widely the self-loading idea spread.

Designed in 1950 and in production the next year, the 870 uses a bottom-loading, side-ejecting receiver with dual action bars. More than 11 million have been made, and it has been chambered in gauges from 12 to .410 with barrels from 14 to 30 inches. The atlas notes that law enforcement agencies and military organizations around the world adopted it for close-range use, which makes it the common baseline against which the later combat designs differ.

Maxwell Atchisson designed this fully automatic 12 gauge in 1972 with reduced recoil in mind, but only prototypes were built under his own development. Military Police Systems later acquired the design and in 2005 released a reworked version with a gas-operated system the maker says absorbs about 80 percent of the recoil. Its recorded status is prototype or experimental, so it shows how far the automatic shotgun idea was pushed rather than a wide service weapon.

Franchi built the SPAS-12 from 1979 to 2000 as a combat shotgun that could switch between semi-automatic and pump-action fire. It was first named the Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun, then renamed the Sporting Purpose Automatic Shotgun in 1990 to meet United States import rules, and the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban ended American importation. Roughly 37,000 were built, and it appeared in conflicts including the Troubles and the Lebanese Civil War.

Developed by TsNIITochMash for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and made at the Tula Arms Plant, the KS-23 fires a 23x75mmR round from a rifled barrel. Russia officially classes it as a carbine rather than a shotgun, and it is regarded as the largest bore shotgun in modern military and police use. It entered service around 1985 for riot suppression, a very different job from the battlefield roles of the earlier guns on this path.

Designed by John Trevor Jr. and manufactured in South Korea by Daewoo Precision Industries, the USAS-12 is an automatic 12 gauge whose name stands for Universal Sporting Automatic Shotgun. Its history section records that about 1989 Gilbert Equipment Co. of the United States decided to bring the selective-fire weapon to market. It was later produced or sold in the United States through several firms, in both automatic and semi-automatic civilian forms.

The fourth and last model in Benelli's Super 90 line, designed in 1998, introduced the company's own Auto-Regulating Gas Operated system for this gun in 12 gauge. In early 1999 the United States Army awarded the M1014 Joint Service Combat Shotgun contract through Heckler and Koch, which imported it, and the first 20,000 units went to the Marine Corps in 1999. Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States have all adopted it, ending the path with a shotgun built from the start for armed forces.