Before you start reading, I will just say, none of us are going to put a shotgun through what they put them through unless we live through the apocalypse... In the military and in the life of an avg gun owner, you replace parts and do so often times to have the highest degree of reliability.

There's a difference between a gun needing to be range ready and combat ready and they run their guns into the ground.

He has a wealth of firearm knowledge, more than a GI armorer based on the way they treat their guns and what they need to do in order to make a profit.

Not shockingly, he says the Benelli M4's are what he prefers, but people just like the pump.

Heck, I love a pump shotgun. That said, there's some interesting info in this thread.

https://www.ar15.com/forums/armory/High-round-count-shotguns-to-include-Mossberg--Remington--Benelli-and-Chinese-clones/1-474035/?

"I don't know the name of the parts that are breaking on the Remington's but we would have to remove the rivet(s) on the left side of the receiver in order to repair it. The other parts that both shotguns (Mossberg and Remington) lose very early, are the "forks" that operate the slide. They both last about the same time and I can't say one is better than the others. We did have some older police trade-in's Remington's with the wood furniture that lasted the longest. We spoke to rep's from both companies at a private tradeshow and both of them didn't seem to believe us in how short of a life-span the shotguns have on our range. I wish we could just use Benelli M4's but customers want to hear the pump-action sound that they've heard on every movie, tv show and video game.

We consider shotguns disposable at this point and it's not worth the time to repair them. We will probably just start listing them on a Gunbroker account and sell them in lots as "fixer-upper's" because we don't have time to sell them one-by-one and then have to deal with customers telling us they want to return it because it's not easy to fix as they thought.. or they didn't know it was broken (though the ads CLEARLY stated they were), etc..."

Later he goes on to say:

"Mossbergs and Remington pump-actions will get 3 and at MOST 4 weeks of use before they are hard-broke. It's been abused with 00 buck, birdshot and even higher velocity frangible but nothing has taken it out of action.

If I ever had to have one shotgun for the rest of my life, it would be the Benelli M4."

and

"Trust me, we keep at least ten Mossberg and/or Remington's on hand because they go down so often. The biggest offenders are the Mossberg 500 and the Remington 870 (standard model I would guess). We had some old 70's or 80's police trade-in's that last quite a while and they finally all went down. We can get those up and running again but we need to punch the rivet on the left side of the receiver and replace a component. The Mossberg 590's do last much longer than the other two standard models they eventually break as well. We have a bunch of shotguns that we still have to demil. It's cheaper just to buy a new one than spend the money and TIME on replacement parts and all the "tuning" to make the replacement parts work properly.

If it was up to me, I would only use the Benelli M4's but customers want to see and experience the "pumping" action of a shotgun. They've seen and heard it their entire lives on movies and television so most customers tend to choose the pump-actions. We let customers know that the Benelli (we've only had one) it much lighter on recoil so it does get used quite a bit as well."