Editing Shotgun (section)

==The Short-Range Shotgun Fallacy==
It's a common belief amongst people that shotguns are strictly short-ranged weapons, that their particular ammunition makes them all but useless at a distance. As the title of this segment suggests, such a belief is pretty much wrong. Here's why. The primary reason this idea exists is because of vidya; because shotguns are preferred for tight confines and urban fighting, most early shooters (other than the original [[Doom]], ironically, though it has its own fair share of the blame discussed below) made shotguns do more damage the closer that you were to the target for balance, and the idea was absorbed into popular culture. The whole shotgun fallacy is similar to the flamethrower fallacy in which both weapons are actually much more accurate and longer ranged in real life rather than being only effective at less than ten feet like most video games.

The entire "shotguns are only good at short range" idea is based on the notion that when a shotgun fires, the pellets it expels will spread further and further apart as they travel, until they are so scattered they're incapable of dealing any real damage to whoever they hit. It's not ''entirely'' without basis, and in fact this was a well-known issue with the blunderbuss, but it's mostly false when it comes to today's shotguns.

See, unlike blunderbusses, shotguns have small, narrow barrels, rather than the tapering wide-bore muzzle of their predecessor. Thusly, whilst a shotgun shell's contents do have a scattering effect that means it's impossible to get the same pinpoint precision accuracy you would have with, say, a sniper rifle, they don't scatter anywhere near so far as a blunderbuss's shot would, even when using a wide-bore. In fact, this scattering effect is ''precisely why'' shotguns are considered the best guns for hunting with; the spread of pellets is much more likely to connect with a fast-moving target, and this is especially important when hunting birds or small game. Further more, some shotguns can also fit a device called a choke. A choke is threaded onto the end of a barrel, the choke has a slightly smaller internal diameter than the barrel. This forces the shot to stay tighter together, farther down range. This is how turkey hunters can kill with neck shots without damaging meat at 40 or so yards. Some shotguns, typically called slug guns, do have rifled barrels. While terrible for shot (the imparted spin spreads the shot dramatically, like video game levels of spread), it shines with solid metal projectiles. Special slugs designed with rifling in mind, provide significant range increases. Practiced shooters can make 150 yard shots rather easily. There are even chokes with partial rifling to allow smoothbore guns threaded for chokes, to shoot some specialized rifled slugs.

This said: compared to the multiple hundreds of meters effective range of rifle-caliber bullets the shotgun "''is''" a short-ranged weapon. What they don't tell you however is that most fire fights are short-ranged anyway, which is the main reason why after World War Two armies stopped using what we would call "Battle rifles" and swapped to smaller caliber assault rifles (trading in range for [[Dakka|a higher rate of fire]]). For most situations a shotgun is as good as a rifle if not a little better since it's actually easier to hit your target with a shotty. The main disadvantage is that you can't carry as much ammo (the 12ga shells are bigger and heavier than the average rifle bullet), and shot is rather inefficient against body armor. TL:DR; an assault rifle is more versatile than a shotgun, hence the AR gets used.

Although [[Doom]]'s standard shotgun averted this issue handily (being able to snipe [[Beholder|cacodemons]] at medium range, though it helped that cacos are rather wide targets), the ''super'' shotgun introduced in the sequel is probably where this belief took root in gaming. It launched ''far'' more pellets than a regular shotgun blast ([[Wat|damage-wise it's almost equal to a rocket's]] [[Awesome|with blast radius taken into account]]), but it was balanced out by its significant spread, meaning you had to get up close to ensure maximum damage on single targets whether it was an [[Meme|agitated skeleton]] ready to sock you in the jaw, or your chaingun-equipped buddy running towards you guns blazing during a deathmatch. With the Doom franchise having such a massive influence on 90s FPSes (including id Software's later products no less), this trait was <s>copypasted</s> followed accordingly, [[Skub|often with the excuse of multiplayer balance if the game could support it]], and beyond.

Unfortunately, not all devs and QC teams are created equal, and the spread of some vidya shotguns was better-justified than others (in Doom 2 for instance, the super shotgun's sprite has a sawed-off barrel ''and'' you'd fire both barrels at once per trigger(s?) pull, a trick that would generate serious recoil and shorten the lifespan of a real world double barrel). One particularly notorious case was... the shotgun from Doom 3, whose spread was so ''bad'' [[Rage|not even a point-blank shot was guaranteed to kill a mook in one hit,]] [[Bullshit|even if you aimed for the head]]. While Doom 3's level design was more claustrophobic, the shotgun's spread was simply too much for ''anyone'' to defend (and the super shotgun wouldn't be introduced until the Resurrection of Evil expansion pack, ergo no yardstick to compare the shotgun's spread and damage unless you forked over the dough). Thankfully for Doomguy, id realized the folly of this approach and brought back the shotgun's reasonable spread from Doom 2016 onwards (and made sure to include the super shotty in the base arsenal).

One of the few games that ignores the whole 'Shotguns are only useful at close range' trope is hilariously Gears of War, which is one of the most testosterone-poisoning and over the top games made. Whilst its true the Gear's shotgun instakill enemies up close, most players actually use the shotgun at it was intended, which was a mid-range weapon. It is telling when the majority of players prefer the shotgun than the iconic lancer assault rifle in open space firefights as it is amazingly accurate despite the spread and deals decent damage. There are even reports of players [[Wat|sniping with the shotgun better then most snipers.]]