Is Your Auto Loading?

At the turn of the 20th century, when the autoloading shotgun was beginning to catch on among hunters, one gun writer of the day predicted that it was such a wonderful idea it would eventually make all other shotgun types obsolete.

It’s easy to see why he made such a prediction. Whereas the pump gun--which was extremely popular at the time--requires interaction from the shooter from shot to shot, the semiautomatic fires a shot with each pull on its trigger, and it keeps on doing it until its magazine is empty or the pheasant or duck falls from the sky. And as hunters eventually discovered, the self-loader softens recoil a bit when compared to a fixed-breech gun.

Well, as it turns out, that firearms expert was at least half right. A shotgun that feeds itself is a wonderful idea, and such guns are incredibly popular among hunters and clay-target shooters today, but autos have yet to make other types of shotguns obsolete. If nothing else, the self-shucker has been and always will be a controversial shotgun, with one side declaring it unreliable and downright unsporting and the opposite team touting it as the best thing since smokeless powder.

The autoloader will go longer between cleanings than some of its detractors would have us believe. While shooting doves in Argentina not long back, I fired more than fifty boxes of 20-gauge shells in a field grade Beretta AL391 without cleaning it. Along about round 1,350, its bolt began to travel a bit sluggishly. Up to that point, the gun had not malfunctioned once, but I figured it was getting ready to. I had no oil in my kit, but as I field-stripped the gun I noticed a trace of oil inside the magazine cap. Rubbing my finger inside the cap and then transferring just a tiny dab of oil to the Beretta’s action bar put me and the gun back in business.

On a more recent shoot in South America, I fired 4,175 rounds in a 20-gauge Beretta AL391 Teknys. It was cleaned at the end of each day, and it malfunctioned only twice during the entire shoot--one of which was due to a faulty shotshell primer.

I mention these two guns because they are what I have used recently, but other autos have proven equally reliable. I have one of the very first Remington Model 1187 shotguns built almost twenty years ago. I’ve shot it a lot and can count the number of times it has malfunctioned on one hand with a finger or two left over. Other semiautos that have seldom if ever let me down include a Browning Gold, a Benelli M2 Field, a Remington 1100 and a pair of Franchi 48ALs in 20 and 28 gauge. I’m sure other reliable autoloaders are out there; I just haven’t gotten around to trying them yet.

It is important, however, to point out that a clean autoloader is a happy autoloader, and the happier it is, the less likely it is to malfunction. Regardless of the type of shotgun I’m shooting, I clean it thoroughly after each hunt or clay-target session. That, along with the fact that I seldom shoot anything but autoloaders of proven design, goes a long way toward explaining why I seldom experience malfunctions. Cleaning an autoloader is so easy there is no good excuse for not doing it on a regular basis, and if you concentrate your cleaning efforts on two or three areas, you and Ol’ Betsy should live happily ever after.