The 930 is fairly paleo in this regard, and its bolt locks into the barrel extension using a single massive locking lug. More modern shotguns like Winchesters and Benellis have rotary bolts, like the bolt of an AR-15. The 930’s reciprocating bolt handle is large and aggressively textured, and the stock features a thick, soft recoil pad. If it’s good enough for Jerry Miculek’s 3-gun 930 SPX, it’s good enough for you. Some Mossbergs come with pistol grips avoid them for this reason and stick with a straight stock. It’s just not cool to remove your strong hand from the gun to manipulate the safety. The only drawback to tang safeties is that they don’t work well with pistol grips. Rear is safe and forward is fire, and if you can’t remember that all you have to do is glance down at it to check. Unlike trigger-guard safeties, the Mossy’s safety knob is big, rugged and ambidextrous, and it’s always right there under your thumb. It doesn’t protrude if the bolt is open or the hammer is already down, and this lets you do a silent press-check without taking your eyes off the target of your hands off the gun.Ī large tang safety sits at the top rear of the receiver, and if your shotgun has a straight stock like most 930s, it works extremely well. When the bolt is closed and the hammer cocked, this rounded pin sticks into the trigger guard as shown here. The white dot front sight bead is extra tall to stand up over it.Ī small cocking indicator protrudes inside the front of the trigger guard. The breaching muzzle is of a larger diameter than the barrel, and seems to be pressed and soldered to the end of it. I didn’t breach any doors during testing (I’m not sure that breaching loads would properly cycle the 930’s action anyway) but it’s possible that the breaching vents helped moderate the gun’s recoil, which was very mild by any standards. This is designed to keep the barrel from bursting if you’re blasting through doorfranes with solid plaster or powdered metal breaching loads. The muzzle wears a sharply crenelated breaching device with multiple elongated vents. The stock and fore-end are black polymer, the receiver and trigger guard are anodized aluminum, and the cylinder-bore 18″ barrel and magazine tube are phosphated steel. It’s chambered in 12 gauge for both 2.75″ and 3″ shells. The Mossberg 930 is a gas-operated semiautomatic shotgun with a tubular magazine. Other semi-automatic shotguns might have illustrious police and military pedigrees, but none of them share the Mossy’s’s $499 street price or ‘Made In USA’ bragging rights. This is not a review of the 930 SPX. The Model 930 is one of the lowest-priced autoloading shotguns on the market, and the only such budget boomstick to be made in America. TTAG is no stranger to the Mossberg Model 930: the 930 SPX was rigorously compared to the FNH-SLP in 2011, and the 930 SPX was also the subject of its own review in 2010.