Contributor Cole C., amongst his countless other contributions to this project, wanted to share this with everyone:

A former executive from one of the two U.S. SPAS-12 importers told me the following:

"I had a personal SPAS-12 that had at least 100,000 rounds fired through it and was running fine at the time I sold it with no major issues to report. This was a demo gun that traveled across the United States and out of the country for sales presentations to friendly foreign government agencies and U.S. government and law enforcement clients. The U.S. Coast Guard once did a 30,000 round test and evaluation with four SPAS-12 shotguns over a 24 hour period and experienced no issues, either.

The most important thing to remember is that the SPAS-12 was designed as a SEMI-AUTOMATIC shotgun with a manual pump-action as BACKUP for use when firing less lethal rounds and grenades.

I suspect that because of the bulk, and because most users reverted to using the manual pump action mode instead of the automatic mode, the SPAS-12 did not catch on quite as well as it could have...The users who operated the weapon just did not understand its design and intended use..."