Talk:Riot gun

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The term 'riot gun' is more commonly used to denote a police or combat shotgun, designed for heavy firepower, especially useful against groups of people given their typical cylinder bore (no constriction of the barrel) barrels which cause maximum dispersion of the shot load.

The device pictured here is one of a number of crowd or riot control devices, not strictly a 'riot gun' in its common meaning.

Ithaca, Winchester, Remington, Mossberg and several other companies make combat and riot shotguns which have often been supplied in great numbers to standard units of police forces due to their relatively low cost as compared to higher-end combat shotguns like Bennelli or Beretta.

This entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_shotgun is more accurate, and the'riot gun' entry should simply be a referenced different version of this entry, 'gun' being short for 'shotgun' in this instance.

Barrel length has no effect on patterns. Choke determines the spread. Barrel length only affects velocity. 68.75.171.218 02:46, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Removed the image, due to the fact that it was very poorly made, and looked way too cartoony. 68.98.50.49 07:44, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I restored the image, because it is better than no image at all. Anthony Appleyard 09:17, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] only smoothbore riot guns may be sold to civilians

Please provide some context. For they layman it's totally unclear why. Are they less dangerous? Shinobu (talk) 14:28, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Two reasons. First, smoothbores won't activate rifle grenades, which use an inertial lock that relies on the spin of the rifling to activate the grenade a fixed distance past the point of firing. This, combined with the 3mm difference in diameter, prevents you from stuffing a 40mm grenade into a 37mm launcher and using it. Another issue in the US is the National Firearms Act; riot guns must be large bore, and anything over 0.5 inches (about 12.5 mm) with a rifled barrel is considered a "destructive device" and subject to the same restrictions as other class III firearms, such as machine guns. scot (talk) 15:47, 14 December 2007 (UTC)