Hi-ho, Silver!

Mossberg 590 Mariner

Mossberg 590 Mariner

Ladies and gentlehobbits, welcome back to Tales of a Gun. This time we'll divert a bit from pistols and revolvers to look at a shotgun.

This one is a Mossberg 590 Mariner, with the 20" cylinder bore barrel, and 8 round tubular magazine. Because it's a Mariner model, it's finished in some sort of matte silvery stuff that Mossberg calls "Marinecote." They don't really say what it's made of, except to say that it's definitely not stainless. Most guesses are that it's some kind of nickel-based coating, but it could be made of fairy dust for all I know. I've never had a corrosion issue with this gun, but then I've never used it in a salt water environment, either. I keep it dry and oiled just like I would a blued gun, so I can't really testify to its durability.

What led me to Mossberg? And to this one in particular?

I'm actually an adult convert to Mossies, having been raised in a Remington household. (In fact, both my semi-auto shotguns are still Remingtons, but more on them another day.) My dad and grandpa both shot 12 gauge Remington 1100s for pretty much anything that needed a scattergun, from rabbits to deer. They bought me and my brother 20 gauge 870s. It's ironic that at the time, I couldn't wait to get a "grown up" 12 gauge, but now my dream field gun is a Belgian Browning Light 20. (But I digress.)

The Remingtons worked fairly well. Dad's and Gramps's were the gorgeous highly polished bluing and glossy wood that craftsmen of a bygone age could produce. Amazing to think today that those were considered hunting guns. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of men thought nothing of dragging such beauties through wood and water, fen and field. Such a far cry from spray paint and cerakote, (or even from the silvery miracle-cote of this week's subject.)

Our 870s, on the other hand, were the Express versions, sold by the bajillion at Wal-Mart and K-Mart, those bastions of quality and craftsmanship. The wood was just barely finished, and the metal was parkerized. Probably better suited to hunting abuse, but combined with the less than manly chambering and differences in semi-auto vs pump, they did not engender much affection.

Still less did Remington's two great faults. The cross-bolt safety, and the flappy-doodly carrier. The cross bolt safety is behind the trigger guard. It's difficult enough for a right hander to reach, if he's been trained in trigger discipline. Even worse for a left hander.

And then there's that blasted carrier. They say that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Likewise, eternal vigilance is the price of continuing to shoot with a Remington. If you don't quite get the shell locked into the magazine, the carrier will flip down, then the shell will shoot back into the action and get stuck between carrier and bolt. The gun is done, tied up until you can extricate the wayward shell, (usually by pulling the mag end cap, spring, follower, etc.

As soon as I had my own money, I went looking for something that was a manly 12 gauge, (I know, I know. But I was young,) and not an 870. I tried a Winchester 1300, but wasn't really impressed. My brother tried an old Mossberg 500 that someone sold him for $50. That was a piece of work. The forend was held together with duct tape, and the stock looked like it had beaten more game to death than it had shot. Even so, it still ran. I picked up the now discontinued Mossberg Maverick 91, which is the budget blaster version of the Mossberg 835, the pump designed for the 3.5" Magnum 12 gauge.

That gun was brutal to shoot. Light weight and magnum will do that, of course, but even worse was the stock. I didn't realize until years later that it was just plain too long. I'm not a small fellow, and the usual 14-14.25" factory stock fits me fine, but this one did not. I have no idea what the LOP may have been, aside from excessive.

Eventually, I just gave up on pumps in general. I found a Remington Model 11, the American licensed version of the Browning Auto-5 at a gun show for $100. It followed me home, and I didn’t shoot another pump for at least ten years.

When I did, it was due to Cowboy Action competition. I mostly shot a hammerless double barrel in matches, but the Winchester 1897 was popular. I picked one up to play with. In that game, shotguns always start open and empty, and are loaded on the clock, but can only be loaded with two shells. That makes for much more of a loading contest than a shooting one. There were lots of Type-A personalities who developed interesting ways to load the old '97. I never quite reached their level of proficiency, but I did determine that for a 2 shot stage, the double was the clear winner. For four, (the vast majority) they were about even, though the double tended to be more reliable. For six or more shells, the '97 started to pull ahead, even for me, a mediocre pump shooter, but a double specialist.

Some time later, when I got a hankering to see what I might be able to do with modern guns, I decided to try 3-gun. I took a look at what the race gunners in open were doing, and my 1911 and revolver loving soul recoiled. "Maybe not quite that modern," I thought. I looked around a bit more, and decided on Heavy Metal division. That required a .30 caliber battle rifle, a .44 or .45 handgun, and a 12 gauge pump. Just my speed. I gave some thought to trying a '97, but they're just too hard to keep running.

I decided to get something modern. I remembered that old Mossberg 500 of my brother's. It had been ugly as sin, beaten and neglected as it was. But it still ran. Really smoothly, in fact. And Mossberg had a few other things going for them. They had put the safety up on the tang where God intended. The carrier stayed out of the way, to make for easier loading. They'd always seemed cheap and chintzy, but people said they'd gotten a lot better, which was more than could be said for Big Green about that time.

I researched all the different models. It turns out that its surprisingly difficult to tacticool a 500. The way Mossberg did the barrel nut to magazine tube connection, you can't really extend them. You have to get the longer tube "security" model to start with.

I decided if I was going that route, I wanted one of the upgraded models, the 590 or 590A1. They're military spec, after all. Who wouldn't want that? So I started looking. Pretty soon thereafter, I found a goofy silver thing with a plastic stock in the pawn shop for about $200. I looked it over. I googled the Mariner model. I handed over $200.

This gun is truly impressive. Being an aluminum receiver and polymer stock, it's surprisingly light. Every single time I pick it up, I think, "Wow, that's light." If the serial number is to be believed, it's about a 2006 vintage. I don't know what its life before me may have held, but it was already well broken in and slick when it came to me. I shot it some, and did a bunch of dry-fire, eventually learning to pump and keep the front end on the target.

The whole three gun thing got put on the shelf for a while, but eventually for my fortieth birthday, my dad, brother and I all got to go to a match. And there I learned a valuable lesson about shotguns. In my little bit of shooting with it, I'd never done a particularly long string of fire. I did most of my loading practice in dry-fire, so as not to burn up shells unnecessarily. When I came to a shotgun heavy three-gun stage however, with something like 40 rounds in one long go. A shotgun, when fired rapidly and continuously, becomes a very hotgun. My loading technique, painstakingly perfected in dryfire involved flipping the gun sideways, holding barrel and foregrip, and loading with the dominant hand.

Holding the barrel. The increasingly HOT barrel. Muscle memory was not my friend in this instance. Every time I shot the gun dry, I immediately went to the same pose, thumb on the barrel. By the time I finished that stage, I had a blister the size of a silver half dollar on the ball of my thumb.

It turns out that they make composite heat shields for the Mossberg 590. Apparently they're not just for cosmetics. Adding one of those is pretty much the only modification I've made to this gun

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Assuming you've made it this far, thank you! Next week, we'll be looking at this gun's little brother, the 590S Shockwave.

If you're one of them "good ol' boys raised on shotgun," to quote Hank Jr, did you carry on your family traditions? Or did you switch teams? Let me know in the comments.