Prices Are Crashing: 10 Shotguns Preppers Can Buy Dirt Cheap (October 2026)

📖 Get The Old Gun Hand, fifty years at the gunsmith's bench, written down: https://ivansjournal.com New shotgun sales fell seventeen percent in a single quarter this year. Dealers cut their shotgun stock by more than nine percent. And somehow the average gun sold across American counters still cost more than it did a year ago. That's because the people still buying are buying expensive rifles and expensive handguns. The plain working shotgun, the one every preparedness list tells you to own, is the gun almost nobody is shopping for right now. The prices didn't crash. The attention did. So you know where I stand before anybody writes in: this isn't a list of the cheapest shotguns on the shelf. Cheapest new and smartest buy turned out to be two very different guns. The one I'd trust least and the one I'd trust most cost about the same money. One of them is new. The other one somebody else already bought. I've watched a lot of cheap shotguns come and go. Some run for decades. Some make you pay twice. The difference usually isn't the price tag. It's knowing why a gun is cheap in the first place, and what that price is trying to tell you. What we go through: Stevens 320, the Winchester 1300 lookalike and why I'd never trust one I hadn't fed first Stevens 301 single shot, and the one gun on this list where "prices are crashing" is flat wrong Stoeger Coach Gun, two barrels, two triggers, and why you buy it used Winchester SXP Defender, the inertia-assisted pump, and why the twenty gauge changed my mind Maverick 88 Security, the parts it shares with the Mossberg 500 and the ones it doesn't Benelli Nova, a polymer pump built for wet trucks, boats and barns Remington 870 Fieldmaster, the chamber fix and the move from Ilion to Georgia Stoeger M3000 Defense, a Benelli-family inertia semi-auto and the ammo test you can't skip The used 870 Express, the sticking-shell reputation and what it actually costs to fix The used Mossberg 500, roughly half the price of new, and why it takes the top spot Said plainly on safety and the law: make sure any used gun is unloaded before you inspect it, cycle snap caps or dummy rounds, and leave chamber work to a qualified gunsmith, not a drill and sandpaper. Barrels stay at eighteen inches and twenty-six overall under federal law. The two hundred dollar tax stamp on short-barreled shotguns went away in 2026, but registration did not, and your state may have its own rules on top. If you're buying cheap to flip, the federal rules on dealing got stricter in 2024. The ownership mistakes and hard lessons I wish somebody had told me years earlier are in my book, at ivansjournal.com. Buy the ammunition the same way you buy the gun. Early, in quantity, and before anybody's panicking. Tell me in the comments if you've owned one of these and whether I was fair to it. And tell me this: what's the cheapest shotgun you ever owned that never let you down? #Shotguns #Mossberg500 #Remington870 #Maverick88 #BudgetShotgun #UsedGuns #Preparedness #HomeDefense #BenelliNova #StoegerM3000 #GunMarket #ShotgunReview #SelfReliance #GunOwnership #IvansJournal