Neighbor has a 20G semiauto shotgun that he got from a family member. After placing 2 shells into the plugged chamber, I attempted to cycle the action to load the 3rd, but couldn't for the life of me get the carrier to pickup the shell.

Did a little poking around and found a post on another forum that indicated when loading a shotgun of this type, you need to manually place a shell into the chamber, slam the bolt home and this will engage the internals to begin cycling shells.

The same board had numerous discussions about the same model slamfiring when the bolt slammed home.

Is this normal? I want to give the guy good info, but this seems counterintuitive to me.