Comments on: If a Saiga and an 870 Had a Baby: The Civet 12 Shotgun

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 19:10:54 +0000

Great review, Travis. I totally feel your pain on the shell deformation issue—it’s the Achilles’ heel of mag-fed shotguns, especially with those softer polymer hulls. Since you mentioned looking for higher-quality Saiga mags to see if they’d fix the cycling, have you looked into the technical specs or reliability tests discussed in this thread https://podcast.kkbox.com/sg/episode/Kl41jNQd-KTbLZv8zL? I’m curious if a more rigid feed lip design might mitigate those double-feeds you experienced, or if the Civet’s 870-clone geometry is just inherently finicky with the rocking-lug reload style.

By: LKB

LKB — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:53:18 +0000

Excellent explanation of the inherent problem with mag fed shotguns (deformation of the polymer shells).

But that also begs the question I’ve always had: why hasn’t an ammo company simply put out all-brass shotgun shells and market them as “specially designed for use with magazines”?

All brass shotgun shells have been around forever (many cowboy action competitors use them because they can be reloaded hundreds of times). Article about how they are reloaded: https://www.americanhunter.org/content/loading-brass-shotshells/

Sure, they’d be slightly more expensive than regular ammo. But duty / SD ammo is always more expensive than cheap range stuff, and being able to have mags loaded and ready to go in a SD gun is the whole point of the exercise.

By: tsbhoa.p.jr

tsbhoa.p.jr — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:06:51 +0000

“Sometimes a good pint of stout can impede your add-to-cart finger.”
lowered inhibition does not equal impediment.