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“I’m a fan of the original Kel-Tec KSG, but I think Kel-Teck went a little overboard on this one. While the tube is about the same length as a standard shotgun, the weapon does a bad job of taking on the bull-pup fill.
I think the Kel-Tec KSG 25 is going to sell well among the gun enthusiasts, this is one I’m going to take a pass on.
See the full review below by Guns American Digest.
A 41-Round Shotgun? Kel-Tec KSG-25 — Full Review – GunsAmerica Digest
When the original KSG hit the streets so many years ago, it set the firearms world ablaze. It was the must-have new toy for a variety of reasons. I had a friend at SHOT Show that year seek it out for me, to see if it was real or just a unicorn dream. I wanted one so badly that I could taste it. It seemed to be everything I ever wanted in a truck gun. It’s 14-plus-one rounds of buckshot and slugs made it ideal. There aren’t many problems that you can’t solve with that kind of capacity. How could they possibly improve on that design? Enter SHOT Show 2017 and Kel-Tec has done it again. Now the KSG-25 offers 24-plus-one shells of buckshot and slugs at your fingertips! An entire box of shells onboard, with the reliability of a pump shotgun. Yes, please! I will take one.
The Kel-Tec KSG-25 could be the ultimate home-defense shotgun. It’s 24-plus-one round capacity makes it ideal for things that go bump in the night.
The original KSG was a bullpup design and was engineered from the ground up for the U.S. market to get a maximum shotgun with minimum legal barrel length. The overall package was extremely compact. Shooters had all that firepower with a total length of 26.1 inches. You can read our review of the original KSG shotgun here.
So what is the story with this new model? Why, given the originally stated goals, would Kel-Tec design the same gun with a 30½-inch barrel? Kel-Tec has a long history of innovative guns such as the PF9, SU-16 Series, and the PMR-30. Why take an extremely compact, bullpup design and make it huge? The original answer was to take care of the European market. The KSG was selling like wildfire, but the poor European peasants in less free countries had a problem. Many nations on the other side of the pond had a very different set of restrictions on barrels and overall length. Kel-Tec, being red-blooded American Capitalists, set out to build something acceptable to the European market. Once the specs met the prohibitions set on the serfs, some engineer thought, “If we have to extend the barrel, why not extend the magazine tubes.” It was a happy accident that the overall length of 38 inches resulted in a capacity of 25 shells. The engineers at Kel-Tec thought the finished package was so cool that they decided to release a limited run for the U.S. market.