Is a hunting rifle considered a small gun? How about shotguns?

All Handguns, rifles and shotguns are considered small guns, Big guns are Mini guns, flame throwers,and rocket launchers, And energy weapons is anything that uses cell ammo, Exception is the power fist it is a melee weapon that uses cell ammo.

Thanks :)

The cattle prod uses cells but is a melee weapon, too!

But yeah, the vast majority of things that you'd think of as "guns" are Small Guns. The Minigun is the only thing in Big Guns that's actually a gun, all the rest of the Big Guns are explosives or incendiaries of some sort, though in Fallout 2 they added a bunch of other machine guns like the Bozar and M60.