Above is a picture of a shotgun choke using during the Vietnam war, mainly by the SEALs, for infrantry combat. You don’t see many pictures of them in use or in action. As you know, shotgun buck or pellets exit and spread in a cone or circular pattern, mostly. The duckbill was made to disburse the patter in a horizontal pattern. Very effective on human targets. Especially moving human targets.
You can see it on the end of the radioman’s shotgun, which I am pretty sure is an Ithaca model 37.
Scattered Shots 
I learn something new every day. Never, ever heard of such a thing before.
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Now THAT shocks me
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I feel an entirely inappropriate amount of pride in finding I knew something DG didn’t…
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This is why I tell people to be highly suspicious of anyone who claims to know ‘everything’ about guns. The field is vast and when you start to become a serious student of firearms history, technology, use, etc – it seems like a finite field. Then… the realization sinks in. Every day, I feel dumber than I did the day before now – not because I’m suffering from a Bidenesque degenerative cognition issue, but because every day (or nearly every day), I not only learn some new individual fact, I actually learn of new areas/sub-areas of knowledge I didn’t know existed before. For example, here I learned not only that SEALs had this odd muzzle device to shape a pattern horizontally, I learn that SEALs used shotguns. I’ve met guys from Team 1 and 2 who were in SEA and when discussing small arms with these guys, they’ve never, ever mentioned shotguns. I recently met a Team 2 guy who did something like five tours. Talked guns a bit. He never mentioned shotguns. I know lots of Marine vets of SEA. They’ve never mentioned shotguns. Quad-50’s, M-2’s as sniping weapons, Winchester/Remington bolt guns, M1 Carbines, recoilless rifles, on and on and on. There are few Marines that don’t love talking about their toys. Yet, I cannot remember one Marine ever mentioning shotguns. So: I’ve learned something else new today: we used shotguns in SEA.
Ask me about eastern European arms (including Russian/Soviet guns) and I have to shrug my shoulders and look like a doofus. It’s hard enough to keep up with western Europe, the US, Canada, and South American gun lines and history. Being an American and being burdened with the vastness of American gun history is part of the issue – if you left American guns out of the picture, someone who does nothing but study guns might be able to cover much of the rest of the world other than the UK and Germany. But we Americans invent new guns the way the French come up with new ways to use cheese in cooking.
When you get into firearms…. I mean, really start to become a serious student, every day you will wake up and learn something new literally every day. That’s why I hang out here. There’s obscure bits of information that Kevin had, that Shawn finds, etc – and I squirrel all that stuff away. I need to start considering where I’m going to put all this information I’ve been hoarding away. I’ve considered putting it online somewhere, but I’m pretty sure it would be taken down or blocked at various governments’ request/demands/threats. I’m up to over 20 GB of information now, and it just keeps growing, because (again), every day, I learn something new.
Sometimes, knowing lots of firearms history is exhausting. I see stuff today where I shake my head and mutter “Well, Scooter, I wish you had studied firearms history a bit more, because you’ve just re-invented a particularly round wheel, you’ve just done so in injection-molded polymers, so please hang up on your patent lawyer.”
Other times, I see stuff like the Remington R51 (their recent attempt to duplicate the Model 51 of 100 years ago done cheaply) and I shake my head and say “All you had to do was build what you already had (the Model 51), just in 9×19. That’s it. How difficult could that be? (heavy sigh).” Same comment applies to the Remington Model 32 or 3200. They gave the design to Krieghoff, and that design from Remington is now Krieghoff’s main line of trap/clay guns, the K80, which sells for about $10K. I think Remington could have made some money off that gun if they made it as nicely as the Krauts and sold it for $8K+.
But nooooo. WTF do I know? I don’t have a Harvard MBA, so obviously I’m too stupid to know what is going to make money in the gun business. I just see the Germans selling enough of those K80’s that I see a bunch of them at every trap shooting competition I visit or participate in.
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well you will like a post I have ready for tomorrow id you didnt know shotguns were used in Vietnam
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I first became aware of the duckbill choke from a 1990s video game about SEALs in Vietnam. The user could alter the team’s equipment based on the mission, and a duckbill shotgun was one of the choices.
I had never seen a picture of one, though, and as you’d imagine for a game that ran on a 386, the graphics were atrocious. I had always sort of assumed that it was kind of a flattened cone shape and was surprised in this post to see that it is in fact shaped quite like a duck’s bill. Then I felt kind of dumb.
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