Chief: I assume that's how he cleared it. Ithaca made several changes to the gun before they built their version, extractors being one of them. Since Remington only made it in a 20-bore, maybe some of those changes were designed to make it robust enough to handle 16 and 12 bore?

I was across a small muddy ditch from him when it jammed, so I'm only reporting what I saw. My father-in-law is pretty competent when it comes to this stuff, so while I'm not completely dismissing operator error, I'm fairly sure something odd happened.