Well, since Willie asked for my $.02........Originally Posted by willie
I think TC's post was a good breakdown. My experiences with Remington 870's, Mossberg 500's and 590's as well as limited use of Winchester Model 1300's was in a fairly high volume setting.
When I can through the Academy, in 1976, I think the mindset was 'You've all used these hunting, we've got better things to do.' Shotgun training consisted of, IIRC, three buck and two slugs. Again, IIRC, we fired all the buck from the hip, and the slugs from the shoulder. I remember essentially being grouped in or four lines at the end of a training day and several students firing at the same target before a new one was put up. No attempt was made to score. Once again, I believe the thought was everyone had bird hunted, but had probably never shot from the hip, and maybe never fired a slug. I recall no classroom training other than watching a film called 'Shotgun Second Weapon.'
I learned later, time training was paid for by federal grants, and money was in short supply. My class was 5 weeks long and had 68 students. Four short years later when I showed up as a Tac Officer, the Academy owned 3 Remington 870's and 2 Winchester 1200's. The landscape had changed, a new law had increased the training hours to 400 (10 weeks) and funding was from court docket fees. Shortly after I arrived the Academy bought a group of Remington 870's, six or eight, and we began having the students bring a book of 25 skeet rounds for training, we furnished 5 buckshot and two slugs.
Back to the original 870's and Winchesters - when I came through, you shot whatever they had in the line you were in so the round counts through those shotguns were probably pretty equal. Just spit balling, I'd guess that each one had seen at least 6,000 - 7,000 rounds by the time I showed up.
Ultimately our shotgun program grew to the students bringing 100 rounds of training loads, in addition we furnished fifty rounds bird, give or take, and twenty five buck and ten slugs. So each student was running at least 150 rounds through a shotgun.
From the early 90's on, we had a fleet of 30 training shotguns. We ran a maximum of two relays of 15 each through each range week (three weeks) per class, The students picked which shotgun they used, some of the shotguns were used both relays, every week, others, not so much. The body armor/youth stock shotguns were used the most and we had about 2/3 of the fleet set up that way.
When I walked out the door in 2016, we were still using the original shotguns - the Winchesters were in the armory, but sometime in the early 90's we quit putting them out.
TLDR: At any one time we had about 24 870's and 6 Mossbergs in pretty continuous use.
In terms of armoring, the Mossbergs are easier overall, the trigger plate isn't as complicated, the ejector is easier to service, as are the shell latches. That being said, I've never seen a Mossberg pump action as slick as some of the 870's we had. Primary among the problems with Mossbergs are light hit FTF's when the shooter is pulling back on the forearm instead of pushing forward, and magazine springs that won't reliably feed the last rounds in the tube - usually causing the round to drop to the ground rather than be fed.
870's can be kept running through hard use if you know what you are doing. Our primary problems were broken action bars, broken ejector tips (must be replaced), ejector springs, action bar lock springs, and shell latches coming unstaked. The shell latches coming unstaked wasn't a problem until we did our detailed take down and cleaning every other class, they would fall out when we removed the trigger plate and we would restake them.
Remington stopped teaching several things in their armorer classes over the years - the first was ejector and ejector spring replacement; the second was action bar lock spring replacement. Luckily, we had enough continuity in the program that these were passed down through our staff. One of the last things I did before walking out the door for the last time was put together a powerpoint on ejector and ejector spring replacement. It's just been four years, but I'm sure that skill is lost to the staff.
The chamber issues with later production Expresses and valu-pak shells is well known. We solved those problems in our shotguns by using flexi-hones to polish chambers and lengthen forcing cones. If a n agency owned shotgun had problems, I would clean it up if I was on the range, or if someone told me.
All in all, I still love my pumps, but my autos are a lot less worry. From the LE perspective, IMO an AR is easier to service than an 870.
JMO - like I said TC and Eric G pretty well covered it.
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