When I was a young Army Lieutenant graduating Officer Basic Course, one of the instructors made a speech in which he outlined some of his sage combat advice earned during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among his battlefield tenets, he said: “If someone needs to be shot, shoot them twice.”
We imagine some other gunfighter from centuries previous had the same idea, manifesting this credo in the form of the double-barreled shotgun. While various manner of double-guns can be found across the world and across time, it’s most solidly cemented in the American lexicon. The quintessential coach gun of the Western frontier, from when both justice and power—not always the same thing—spilled from the muzzle of black powder double-barrels like so much lead shot.
Since then, the coach gun has been eclipsed by a number of other firearms as the go-to defender of households and horseless carriages. It could be rightly argued that there are more practical
