The first time I ever saw Benelli's Nova pump shotgun was a couple of years back on a waterfowl hunt in East Texas. It was in a pickup truck belonging to a local goose guide and had already seen a couple seasons' worth of hard use. It was no thing of beauty, to be sure. Greasy mud, driving rain, dank pit blinds and the occasional dunking make for a pretty extreme environment for any firearm, yet the Nova's owner was very high on the gun--which had been stripped, hosed down and re-lubed countless times.

To enlarge this image of the Benelli SuperNova Tactical, please click HERE

Since guides put more hard wear on a gun in a season than most of their clients do in a lifetime, I figure anything that gets high marks from them must be pretty good.

Benelli, of course, is mostly known for its high-end inertia-operated autoloaders: Super 90, Legacy, M1 Montefeltro, Super Black Eagle, M3 Convertible and so forth. However, the pump-action Nova and SuperNovas (in various iterations) have gained a lot of traction in the last couple of years.

We've just had the opportunity to shoot the new 12-gauge SuperNova Tactical SteadyGrip recently, and the reason for the line's popularity isn't hard to guess.

SPECIFICATIONS Benelli SuperNova SteadyGrip
MAKER:	Benelli USA
GAUGE:	3 1/2 inch, 12
CAPACITY:	4 + 1
CHOKE:	Cylinder bore
BARREL LENGTH:	18 inches
OVERALL LENGTH:	40 inches
WEIGHT:	7.8 pounds
METAL:	Matte Black
SIGHTS:	drift-adjustable rifle-type
STOCK:	Synthetic pistol grip
PRICE:	$415

First off, the gun's got a 3 1/2-inch chamber. While that may seem pretty excessive on a tactical shotgun, it does mean that you can shoot anything with the number "12" on the headstamp, which greatly enhances the possibilities of ammo resupply.

The gun features the company's time-proven two-lug rotary Montefeltro bolt and boasts an exceedingly short, smooth stroke. The synthetic stock/fore-end setup allows for a firm grip, and the fore-end is nicely contoured for fast shucking. And the racy angle of the synthetic trigger guard gives it a futuristic look.

Since the entire Nova/SuperNova family practically defines the concept of modular, there are two stock choices: the company's recoil-absorbing Comfortech stock, which features flexing chevrons and a gel cheekpiece, or the SteadyGrip stock, which has a pistol grip for easy one-hand manipulation of the gun.

The Comfortech premiered on the Super Black Eagle II, making it one of the most pain-free 31?2-inch guns on the market. The SteadyGrip has been previously employed on the company's inertia-operated autos in turkey-hunting configuration.

Want another argument in favor of the gun? The SuperNova Tactical SteadyGrip costs less than half as much as the justly revered Benelli M1 Tactical autoloader.

On all rifled slug and buckshot loads I ran through the gun, I stuck with 2 3/4 inchers. If my particular specimen had the Comfortech stock instead of the SteadyGrip, I might have tried some of the long ones, but I'm just not that much of a masochist. And, for the life of me, I can't see where getting, say, another 150 fps out of a 3-inch shotshell is going to radically enhance the terminal ballistics of a one-ounce rifled slug.