Poachers... Something is always happening to them... Is it because the bother of avoiding the Law distracts their attention from other safety issues?
Once when I was a kid, Dad and me went fishing with a guy who turned out to be a pro poacher, and he took his shotgun along (the duck season was open). At dawn, when we woke up, the man started climbing out of the tent when he suddenly stopped and started signalling and whispering to me to give him the gun and a shell, quick, bexause there was a teal sitting just nearby. I got the gun, took a shell out of his ammo belt, looked at it and it was marked #7, so I handed it to him. Boom went the gun and then the guy turns to me and starts cussing me like he was practicing for a profanity world championship.
It turned out, as he put it, that no poacher worthy of the name went anywhere without a slug or two. But, since possession of a slug without valid big-game permit was illegal, to avoid misunderstanding with game wardens, he disguised his slugs to look like shot cartridges. To avoid confusion, he marked them #7, as he himself never shot anything smaller than #3.
Well, anyway, the bottom line here is that slugs and shot in the same place call for extreme caution.
I've heard of many huters who carried slugs "just in case", and loaded either one of the barrels of a double, or the first couple of shells in an auto's magazine, when they felt a bear or boar attack was likely. Almost invariably, the result was that a slug was fired at a bird by mistake.
This won't cause any problems if the hunter follows the basic safety rules in the first place. But if the slugs availiable might be dangerous for the gun, as in the problem discussed, it would be a sorry incident indeed to have that Briley tube fly away not as part of saving the owner's skin, but just accidentally.
I'm trying to keep my Russian mentality in check here, but... I've noticed that many of the 3" slug shells use a considerablí length of the shell to hold the bullet, so muc actually, that you can "open" the shell, cut it to 2 3/4, and still have enough left to adequatly "close" the round...
