Shoot a sabot slug through a smoothbore barrel and you get smoothbore accuracy. Shoot a soft-lead Foster slug through a rifled barrel and you'll quickly wind up with a smoothbore because the lead is not hard enough to engage the rifling. It doesn't spin; it just sort of squirts through. That strips lead into the grooves, fills them up, and makes a real mess -- not only of the bore, but the accuracy.

If you shoot soft-lead slugs through a rifled barrel, you achieve less performance than you would when shooting them through the smoothbore barrels for which they were designed. If you shoot sabot slugs through a smoothbore barrel, you gain little, or nothing, in the way of performance over a soft-lead Foster slug.

Shoot a sabot slug in a rifled barrel, however, and 2- to 3-inch, 100-yard groups can be the norm. That may not sound as good as the 1-inch groups that can be obtained with a quality centerfire rifle. If, however, you're taking your deer at ranges less than 150 yards, it does provide all the accuracy you need. There are many lever-action rifles that won't shoot that well.

With a rifled choke tube in a smoothbore barrel, the accuracy may or may not be that good. But it will easily surpass that of a Foster slug in a smoothbore barrel.

There are several ways you can benefit from this new technology.

Adding a rifled choke tube to an existing shotgun is one option, and such tubes are available from a number of gun makers, or from aftermarket makers like Briley, Cation or Colonial Arms. In order to take advantage of that, you need a quality set of adjustable sights on that gun.

If you have a Thompson/Center Encore rifle, a rifled slug barrel is available. If you own a pump or semi-auto shotgun that accepts interchangeable barrels, the route is simple. Just obtain a rifled barrel. Most makers have them available for their interchangeable barrel models. If not, Hastings offers them in its Paradox line, and they can be had with either adjustable iron sights on the barrel, or with a cantilever scope mount.

The latter is the way to go if maximum accuracy is the goal. The cantilever mount is a Weaver base, mounted firmly on the barrel and extending back over the receiver. Mount a scope, sight it in, and when the barrel is removed for cleaning, the scope stays firmly affixed to the barrel and the point of impact on the scope doesn't change.

Combine a rifled slug barrel with a cantilever scope mount and a variable powered scope in the 1X to 4X range, and you have the makings for a "tack driving" slug gun that can deliver rifle-like accuracy at 150 yards.

There are a number of new generation slug loads that will give you that.