Shotshells in a handgun?

[Zoogster]

The longer the barrel the more susceptible the pattern is
to being disrupted. So, snubbies work well with shotshells.

Is that correct, I thought the opposite was the case for shotguns.

My first thought is that the rifling is far quicker to deform the shot, causing it to become more irregularly shaped the longer it is in a rifled barrel.
So the longer the barrel the more rifling more of the shot impacts. Irregular shaped shot tends to open up even faster than spherical shot as they have random aerodynamics that send them in strange directions.

Combine that with the spin of the rifling which already gives centrifugal force and makes donut patterns and you get a very quickly opening pattern.

A second factor RCmodel points out is a very short barrel can have so little rifling that the rifling fails to impart much spin to the soft crushed plastic, or even if it does, the pellets are not inside long enough to be heavily impacted by centrifugal force.
It is after all not a bullet, and being smashed and only traveling through a little rifling may not impart much spin to the crushed mass. Even a crushed mass traveling through enough rifling though will be spinning well when it exits the barrel.

So the shortest rifled barrel possible beats a longer rifled barrel for shot.

 

[bluetopper]

Just bought two boxes of shot capsules so I can make my own 44 Mag shotshells. I had to get some after my buddy gave me some that he already made up.

When I was a little bitty boy I can remember Daddy stopping a few times on lonely West Texas highways and picking up tarantulas when he would see one on the pavement and letting them crawl over him and I would scream and cry. It scared the livin hell out of me at the time.