Shotguns - deer hunting?

[hillbilli]

as the boys observed, any old shotgun with a bead sight can be used to kill deer.. how far you can shoot will greatly depend on your equipment. I started hunting deer with a 20ga single shot. a plain shotgun with a bead and plain win/rem/fed/ or brenneke slugs might reach 75-80 yards or further- or you may find your limit at keeping them on a paper plate is 50-60yds. (mine with the old single shot was about 75) the best approach if you really want to shoot further is probably to get a "cantilever mount" rifled barrel to shoot sabot slugs. (you really need a rifled barrel or a rifled choke tube to shoot the more expensive sabot slugs) I always recommend slugs to folks over buckshot- because most folks can tell the difference at a glance between 35 and 45 yards.. but that may well be the difference between a cleanly killed deer and a deer hit with a few pellets, whereas with a slug a deer is probably just as dead at either range..

[lokidog]

 

I've shot a deer with a 20 smoothbore with single bead at 60 yards, my first, 12g smooth with single bead at 45, and 20g rifled barrel with scope from 7 yards to 93.

It blows that this state won't allow a 20g for elk as they are just as effective as a 12.  IMO 

If you are buying, and not hunting elk, Mossberg (500) makes a nice combo with a smoothbore and a cantilevered scope mount rifled barrel.  They also make a rifled barrel with fiber optic sights which is easier to find but then you have the potential limitations of this type of sight, which I personnaly do not like as much as a scope.

Just remember, if you shoot a smoothbore, you need rifled slugs.  I think you can shoot rifled slugs from a rifled barrel but you get better performance out of the saboted bullets.  If shooting buckshot, you want a smoothbore as a rifled barrel may spin the shot out of any decent kind of pattern.  I would not shoot at a deer much past 40 yards with buckshot, and that only after patterning to make sure I had a pattern not much bigger than 6-8", but that's me.

[Sitka_Blacktail]

Back in the 50s and 60s my family's go to gun for Blacktails in a rainstorm was a shotgun and 00 buck. My dad and uncles grew up on the Mox Chehalis in the Capitol Peak unit and most of the hunting we did was fairly brushy anyway so the shots were never that long unless we pushed a deer into a field or the powerline. I got my first deer, a doe, and my middle brother got his first buck with an Ithica pump 12 ga. 2 3/4 with 00 buck. Mine was a head shot. His disappeared into a salal patch from Hell and took over an hour to find and had one pellet in it, right through the heart.