Useless? No, I don’t think so.
I own a Remington import Baikal coach, and I like it quite a lot. I’ve got a 500 and a 590, but they haven’t left the safe in many years now. When I wanted to hunt something with slugs, I used my NEF Ultra Slug Hunter. When I wanted to hunt turkey, I used my NEF single-shot turkey gun. It’s been over a decade since I took a repeating shotgun into the field hunting. I took my single shots out. They were much more comfortable. I took the 500 out once for rabbits, and never took it out in the field again. If I’d had this coach gun back when I hunted rabbits, I certainly would have used it and left that pump at home.
The coach is what we have for the house. My wife can make it work with minimal training, and that’s all she’s willing to do right now. Perhaps someday that might change, but even if it does I like the double too much in that role to go back to a pump.
I do think one with screw-in chokes might be more useful. Or perhaps one of those old, inexpensive Stevens 26” doubles with fixed chokes. Even with the longer barrels, a double is still shorter than an 18” pump. And I happen to think a trim double is a lot more comfortable carrying around in the field all day than a repeating shotgun. Every so often I’ll come across a hunter who prefers a double barrel or an over/under, and flat refuses to use repeating shotguns in the field. They’re usually seasoned fellows, and never bought into the notion that more ammo capacity made a hunter successful.
Big Bill said:
Have you ever seen a SWAT team clearing a house with a coach gun?
Actually, yes. The 18” Stevens 311R was made specifically for the policing community, long before Cowboy Actions games existed. For example, New York City PD had several hundred in their inventory well into the ‘80s, many decades after the pump was considered the “policing standard”. It was very common for NYPD to serve arrest warrants with an Officer on the team carrying a 311 as the only long gun they brought with them. Jim Cirillo’s crew used Stevens 311Rs as well. A coach gun is less expensive and time consuming to train a department on. It wasn’t until the notion of “modernizing” high-risk police response teams took hold that the coach gun started to get thought of as obsolete technology.
But since I’m not on a SWAT team, or in the business of clearing houses, what do I care what they do or don’t use? Contrary to what a lot of the non-policing gun community thinks, police officers don’t get to choose the guns they want to use. It’s decided for them, often by someone who doesn’t understand their job, with considerations and for reasons that might seem quite bizarre to the educated shooter. It might make you really disappointed if you mimicked their decisions because you were under the impression that they were buying that stuff because they thought it was “the best”.