Shotguns

education and choices

When I was ten years old I spent a few hours one afternoon sky-busting at passing ducks with a .410 shotgun.  They looked close enough to me, but my father told me later he’d sat across the marsh watching me shoot at the ducks, which he said were at least 100 yards up, high in the sky.  No matter.  I was excited, getting familiar with a shotgun, and he was happy to see me enjoying myself, all alone in a duck blind I’d made from palmetto fronds, on the bank of a ditch.  I didn’t cut a feather through two boxes of shells, fifty shots. 

The gun was a model 42 Winchester pump, which I learned could be effective on cottontails, squirrels and quail out to about thirty yards if they sat still, or doves on a limb, but hopeless on any critter that decided to run or fly.  It was a full-choke gun, and I suspect the shot pattern at thirty yards wasn’t much wider than a dinner plate, way too small for consistent hits in a beginner’s hands.  It never malfunctioned, despite lots of mud, dust and neglect.  The adults I knew all shot the Winchester Model 12 pump gun.  I never knew a “Model 12” to break down. When a friend of my father’s took his gun apart to give it a good cleaning, I was fascinated with the process.  A squirt of oil and a wipe-down was all Dad’s gun got after a hunting trip.  I was a skinny kid, only weighed around 90lbs, so I appreciated the low recoil of the .410.  I was afraid of the larger gauges.  I’d shot a .12 gauge and it kicked like a mule and bruised my shoulder and cheek.  

When I first started shooting clay birds, where you shoot thousands more shots than any field shooter and scorecards don’t lie, I learned about the importance of good gun fit, which is something most hunters never consider.  Often bird shooters take a new gun out of the box and head to the field.  I didn’t learn better until I went to an Orvis sponsored event 30 years ago where they had a gun fitter who, for $50, had me use a “try gun,” a shotgun with an adjustable stock to determine what the ideal measurements of my guns should be.  There’s no such thing as one gun for all shooters.  It’s not good enough for ol’ Uncle Bob have you face him with an empty gun and let him see how your eye lines up down the gun’s rib. 

There’s no substitute for using a try gun and busting some shots on a clay bird field or at a stationary shotgun pattern target with the help of a gun fitter.  Then there’s the expense of having your guns altered by a qualified gunsmith, which can be considerable if much work or a new stock is required.  Poor gun fit accounts for lots of bruised and busted cheeks, but a gun that fits the shooter will help avoid all that and increase hits in the field and at the range.

Yesterday, fifty-four years later, I was touching and feeling shotguns in my local gun shop, and a 25-year-old salesman who weighed in the neighborhood of 240 lbs, handed me a new .12 gauge Beretta semi-automatic with a fancy name and a camo paintjob.  He said he liked it best because it offered “low recoil and solid reliability.”  Beretta’s auto-loaders operate using the gas released when a shot is fired to cycle the gun’s action, which has been proven to be the best way to reduce “kick.” 

The salesman was a goose hunter big and thick enough to handle the massive kick of a light weight single-shot 10 gauge if he chose to, and too young to have much personal experience with a variety of guns in different situations.  Here in Colorado if he shot geese 15 days of the season, a very unlikely proposition for a working stiff, he might get to shoot 120 times to get his 60 geese, if he’s an average gunner.  That’s not a lot of shooting.  He was short on real knowledge.  Gun fit never came up.  The gun he was selling was perfect for everyone.

Why the pitch for reliability with the auto-loader?  After all, when you buy a double-barreled gun the topic of reliability never even comes up.  A quality double shotgun is the epitome of functional reliability.  When the White Hunter goes in the bush for the wounded leopard he takes the “double.”

I’d shot thousands of shells before the salesman’s daddy was born, and I knew that as long as shotguns have been made there’s been a search for a shotgun combining light weight, low recoil and reliability.  The Beretta was a state-of-the art shotgun, but it fell far short of that ideal.  In my own hands in the past year I had experienced the utter failure of two semi-automatics by the same manufacturer he was touting.  

When I said that I enjoyed the Berettas’ low recoil but found them completely unreliable, the salesman ran out the usual, “Everybody I know has good luck with ‘em,” etc.  I told him that only the day before I was duck hunting near Greeley, Colorado, and my twenty gauge Beretta AL 391 semi-automatic refused to work.  The action froze up, leaving a loaded 3 inch shell jammed nearly all the way in the barrel.  The gun wouldn’t fire and we couldn’t get the cartridge out of the barrel.

I told him too about my trip a year ago to Canada on a goose hunting trip when my Beretta AL 391 semi-automatic .12 gauge refused to eject spent cartridges.  I could only shoot it one shell at a time. (Keep in mind that these were state-of-the-art auto-loaders, spotlessly clean, properly lubricated.) When I got back to the motel that night I asked the outfitter to take a look at it to see if a simple repair was possible.  He took it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together, assuring me that all was well, the action working smoothly.  Unfortunately, he left out an important piston during reassembly.  The next morning I shot it once and the entire forend shattered in my hand, rendering the gun useless.  I watched the other guys shoot their limits, trying not to whine loud enough for them to hear me. 

You can buy a nice new shotgun for the cost of having Beretta do repairs.  Shipping and insurance costs are high, and you can’t just mail a gun in the U.S, you’re required to have an “FFL”, a Federal Firearms License to receive the gun back from the repair shop.  The local gun shop charged $40 just to hold the box for me to pick up!  The cost of repair was nearly half the original cost of the gun, which is not part of the purchase conversation at most gun shops.  

Back in the 1980s I shot skeet, trap and sporting clays.  I busted 15,000 rounds a year, keeping two Ponsness Warren reloaders busy.  I shot two guns, a Perazzi twelve gauge over-and-under and a Krieghoff tubed set allowing me to shoot all four gauges at skeet events.  I had  $12,000 invested in the two guns.  Both had custom fitted stocks.  The .12 gauge barrels were ported to help keep the barrels stable after the first shot, and had choke tubes, allowing a wide range of choke choices.  Each had recoil reducers installed in their stocks.  I was serious about having the best equipment, and I looked good at the range with those fancy shotguns and all the right accessories, but the .12 gauge double guns were too punishing, particularly on days when I shot more than 200 times.  They beat me like a red-headed stepchild, but they were absolutely reliable.  In five years of competitive shooting I never had a malfunction.  Zero repair costs.  100%  reliability.

Then a common thing happened to me:  I developed a flinch, a maddening unconscious reaction to the noise and recoil from a shotgun that practically guarantees a missed target.  In my case a flinch meant shutting my eyes and wincing, blinking an instant before pulling the trigger.  In a sport where one or two misses puts you out of contention, flinching ended my competitive shooting.

In an effort to stay in the clay birds games I took the advice of a top shooter and bought two Remington Model 1100 semi-automatics to shoot in the .12 gauge skeet and trap events and Sporting clays.  The 1100s offered a way to avoid the heavy recoil of the double guns.  I hoped the flinch part of my brain would recover.  I was ready to try anything.

The auto-loaders are sweet to shoot, particularly the Remington 1100, and they offer what some shooters think is a bonus-- the available third shot in the field.  Recoil is dramatically less and their balance and “feel” are excellent.  They “point” well, which means that they go easily to your shoulder and your eye is naturally lined up down the sighting plane of the barrel’s rib.  I loved the low recoil!  Unfortunately, though the recoil was considerably softer and I enjoyed shooting the autos, I continued to flinch.  A bummer.

Another annoyance had cropped up:  my 1100s broke down four times in one year at shooting events.  I had learned to carry a spare parts kit, and how to install a new –O-- ring in a flash.  Skeet  rules allow for two gun malfunctions during a 25 shot “round”, but it’s unnerving—particularly to a “flincher”, to be on the line and have your gun not fire when you pull the trigger.  I was toting two guns to skeet events just to make sure I had one that would shoot, which I learned was common among competitive gunners shooting 1100s.  Out of pure frustration at my declining performance on the range and the aggravation of the break-downs, I said the hell with 1100s and sold ‘em both and went back to the double guns. (Quality double guns hold their value pretty well, but not so with used auto-loaders.  I took a significant loss on the sale.)  

Semi-autos look tacky anyway compared to the more traditional over-and-unders, I told myself.  And, I had discovered a number of other complaints along the way.  

With the over-and-unders I extracted my spent shells at the skeet range and saved them in a pouch so I could reload them later. After each twenty-five shot “round” with the semi-auto I had to scurry around picking up my spent shells off the ground like a pigeon eating popcorn.  That didn’t fit with my self image of how I looked as a gentleman gunner, which was my fallback position now that my scores weren’t good.  Part of the reloading fun is trying to keep the cost per shot as low as possible, so I made the effort to pick up my “hulls,” sometimes nearly banging heads with other reloaders.  I looked like a fool, I’m sure.

In low-light conditions when the gun fired you could see a belch of flames shoot out of the auto-loading Remington 1100 magazine, inches from your eye.  No wonder I continued to flinch!  Who knows what your eyes tell your brain about stuff like that? (The new Benelli auto-loaders don’t have a gas operated system, so there’s no flaming gas, but there’s bound to be more felt recoil than with the Remington.  Allowing the spent gas to leave the gun quickly out of the magazine rather than down the barrel is what produces the recoil reduction.)

Now that I was only a gentleman shotgunner, not a serious competitor, I might want visit an English estate to shoot birds, and I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to bring a semi-automatic.  Proper British estate shooters see them as crass, too American.  Too much clang and snap, don’t you know, Old Chap?  The idea of a third shot at a fleeing bird that’s probably out of range is not sporting.  And, only with a double can everyone in a hunting party can see instantly if your gun is unloaded.  It’s assumed loaded, ready to fire when closed, safe when open.  A surprising number of auto shooters walk around gun ranges with their guns’ actions closed, so you can’t know if the gun is loaded or not. Gentlemen shoot doubles. Hullo!

A semi-auto handles three shots, so a clay bird shooter—where there’s a maximum of two shots at any station-- can fire two shots at doubles and still have a loaded gun.  I’ve personally seen it happen twice, once on at the Forest City Gun Club in Savannah and once at the Indian Hill Gun Club outside Cincinnati.  On both occasions the guns did not stay in the open position after the second shot at doubles, and the shooter found to his embarrassment that the gun was still—quite by accident--loaded with a third shell.  (Maybe the shooter was loaded at the Forest City Club.  The lounge and bar are just behind the shooting line, and many a gunner there has a few pops then heads back out to bust a few more clays.)  It’s also a common practice for hunters to extract only the cartridge in the barrel of an auto-loader and leave two in the chamber, which leaves a loaded gun, no matter how you excuse the practice.  Such offenders think it’s fine then to put the gun in their car or back in it’s case or in a club gun rack.  

The Brits like doubles because they’re faster to reload and shoot, which can be done without looking down at the gun, replacing spent shells with new ones without taking your eyes off the incoming fliers.  

Duck hunters will tell you that they like the third shot option with an auto for shooting cripples on the water, but most shooters bust all three caps initially and have to reload a fourth shell for a cripple, which probably took a light hit from a too-long third shot in the first place.  Two shots are plenty.

The process of getting mud out of the barrels of a double gun is far easier than with an auto-loader, should you lose your balance or drop your gun and poke it in the mire. You can knock the grit--the snow or mud or leaves-- out of the business end of a double with a simple weight on a string with a cleaning patch attached, which many shooters carry in their jackets.  With an auto gun it’s far more problematic. You can be forced to push the junk from the barrel end with a stick or poker of some kind and it ends up in the chamber of the gun, not a good idea. 

A double gun usually weighs less than a semi-auto, which is meaningful if you’ve got to carry it in the field or bring it up to your shoulder more than two hundred times at a range competition. (Beretta’s catalogue shows a double gun at 6.9 lbs, the new Extrema 2 auto-loader at 7.8 lbs.) The extra weight undoubtedly contributes to the advertised soft recoil of the Extrema 2.  Weight dampens felt recoil.  The lighter weight double will kick more, but it’s a far finer gun to handle.  If you’re hunting, where you don’t shoot as many times and the shots are all different, you don’t notice the recoil as much as you do on a skeet field, where you become more aware of the effects of recoil.  

Doubles will shoot old, swollen shells, as long as you can stuff them in the barrels, which isn’t true of the auto-loaders.  Only new shells or perfect reloads will work in the semi-autos.  And if you’ve ever tried to pry a swollen reload out of the chamber of a semi-auto you know how difficult it can be compared to the same problem in a double gun.

Ammo manufacturers have done more to save bruised shoulders than gun makers, putting out many different “light” shells designed to kick less.  Thousands of clay bird shooters reload their own ammo, looking for an effective recipe of powder, shot, hull and primer to achieve lower recoil and still allow for consistent target breaks at competition distances.

If I were to go back to shooting competitively I’d shoot a custom fitted over-and-under.  I’d shoot the .12 gauge events with .20 gauge tubed barrels.  There’s just a fraction of difference in the .12 and .20 gauge scores in the hands of world-class skeet shooters.  Amateurs wouldn’t notice the difference in their scores if they shoot the smaller shells.  That way I’d have the heavier weight of the .12 gauge gun and frame and the .20 gauge tubes to dampen recoil, and the lighter recoil of the smaller .20 gauge ammo…the best of all worlds for reliablility and low recoil.  For serious smaller shooters the tubed set is the only way to go in the .12 gauge skeet events.

Trap shooting demands a twelve gauge gun.  I’d shoot a heavy over-and-under with recoil suppressors in the stock and a barrel weight to lower felt recoil.  An autoloader spits shells and gas on the guy on your right on the trap field, and the gun’s flaming magazine is a nuisance at night events.

For hunting and Sporting Clays the double is the gun of choice in .12 gauge.  Only in a goose blind where you’ll be making lots of shots with 3 inch magnum shells is the semi-auto called for, despite its unreliability.  

There’s no need for the big .12 gauge when hunting doves, quail, snipe and grouse, the smaller game birds.  The .20 gauge is the best for those, using an improved cylinder choke.  The shells and guns are lighter to carry, the recoil’s more pleasant and the gun will point faster in tired hands at the end of a day afield.

The 1100’s still a top seller, and Beretta keeps putting out their autoloaders, selling them by the millions.  Benelli semi-autos kick a little more, but they keep improving.  The search goes on for less recoil and more reliability in auto-loaders.  It’s the Holy Grail of shotgunning.