Not unless you're oldschooling it hard enough to be using felt or cardboard wads and not a plastic shot cup as found in modern shells. Or unsaboted slugs, I suppose, which definitely contact the barrel. In the former case, you probably already have an impressive handlebar mustache and a large collection of brass shells, a keg of black powder in your basement right next to your keg of whiskey, and you're touching your shot all the time while you're handloading anyway.

Shotguns do, however, disseminate their shot all over the countryside when people hunt with them since statistically speaking only a rather small portion of the shot tends to actually hit the target.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean when you fire the round, the shot exits the cartridge and proceeds down the barrel, naked.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

No it doesn't. The shot cup and the charge of shot travel down the barrel as a single contiguous unit. The outer walls of the cup are what contact the barrel. The shot doesn't appreciably separate from the cup until several feet past the end of the muzzle when the petals of the shot cup are no longer restrained by the barrel. Separation is only able to happen when the cup encounters wind resistance out there in open air, and this is trivially verifiable by firing a bird shot shell at a paper target from only a couple of feet away.

This is all especially so with steel shot, because you definitely don't want that touching the inside of the barrel. I haven't cut a buckshot shell apart lately so I suppose it's possible that there are still commercial loads out there that just utilize a plastic wad with no cup, but birdshot shells certainly don't.

Edit! It was remarkably difficult to find a slow motion video of this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1if2QKHWmU4