Number one thing, I'm no expert. An expert is a has-been drip under pressure, or somebody with a briefcase who's over a hundred miles from home.
Number two thing, you can shoot whatever you want. No skin off my sitter whatever you shoot, brand or type. Your money, your choice- good luck with it.
Pumpguns? I got pumpguns. Mossbergs, Browning, Stevens, Ithaca, Winchester, Remington. I've been shooting pumpguns for almost 40 years now. I LIKE pumpguns. They are an almost uniquely American phenomenon. They are looked down on by bespoke best gun toting titled aristocracy in Europe as "shooting machines." And I like that. Plenty of plain ol' blue collar Americans with pumpguns get a lot more enjoyment out of their time afield than any collection of Eurotrash bluebloods.
It just happens that I am convinced the Remington 870 is the pinnacle of American pumpgun design. I have messed about with most of the offerings on the market, and the 870 tops everything so far in my book. Dave McC ran through a pretty good catalogue of the reasons in his post, no need for me to duplicate them here.
The 870 has a few more age spots and wrinkles than anything else on the market right now as far as pumpguns go. Oh, I know the Chinese are making copies of the old 1897 thumb-buster. That doesn't count, any more than that they are making a knockoff of the 870 (or the Ithaca 37 for that matter). The 870 design has been in production by Remington since early 1950. If it was newly introduced today, the design would still be revolutionary.
The Mossberg 500 hit production in 1961. It's a workmanlike design and has its own set of good features. No one who owns one has anything to complain about. Still, IMHO it just isn't the gun the 870 is.
The main thing for me is that the 870 is so much easier to maintain. It field strips simply and gives easy access to anything likely to need attention. Jumble up the magazine spring on a Mossberg 500, and you have to take off the magazine tube to get to it (a design flaw corrected with the mil-spec 590 series, I might add).
Neighbor's kid came by on the way home yesterday afternoon. He'd been up the road potting doves in a newly-planted wheatfield, and complained that his gun was stiff and hard to pump. Well, he'd gotten the 20 ga. youth model 500 for Christmas a couple of years ago. I don't think it had seen a drop of lube since.
Handiest thing I had was a little fliptop bottle of SLIP 2000, so I dripped a few drops on the bolt races and action bars and racked the gun a few times and gave it back. He pronounced himself satisfied but wondered if he should take it apart for a good cleaning. I advised him against it, since the left shell stop almost invariably falls out when the trigger group is removed. I didn't want him wondering what went where when he got back to reassembly.
A working gun should be tough, reliable, easy to clean and maintain. That's the very definition of an 870 IMHO. That's why I like 'em better than any other design out there. About the only thing you can do to take down an 870 for the count is to crunch the magazine tube- then it needs factory level attention for the fix (which is why us oldpharts keep telling noobs to use clamps on their magazine extensions.) Almost everything else is a relatively simple fix.
870s are the Energizer Bunny of pumpguns. They wear IN, they don't wear out. Most American law enforcement agencies buy 870s when they need shotguns. They are easy to clean, easy to fix on the rare occasions when they break, easy to shape-shift to fit whatever task they need to perform (from breaching to birds to grizzly bears to burglars). They're my favorite, pure and simple.
Hope that helps,
dd
