Rx For Recoil

There is no getting around the fact that shotguns kick, but lucky for us there are several ways to make the discomfort more tolerable. One of the easiest ways to ease the pain is to switch to a smaller gauge. With the exception of shooting steel shot on waterfowl and perhaps late-season pheasant hunting, there's no logical reason why we should hunt with a 12-gauge gun rather than a 20-gauge gun.

A gas-operated autoloader in 20 gauge will handle 99 percent of the hunting 99 percent of hunters do, and it can be quite comfortable to shoot. Not long back I shot doves in Argentina with a 20-gauge Beretta AL391, and even though I averaged more than 1,000 rounds per day, my shoulder never got sore and not once did I suffer a shooter's headache.

It is also a fact of life that heavy guns kick less than light guns. Anytime a hunt requires lots of walking and offers a limited amount of shooting, a lightweight shotgun is the way to go, but a heavier gun is much better for standing in one spot and squeezing off lots of rounds.

One of my favorite shotguns for high-volume shooting is a nine-pound over/under with Briley 28-gauge tubes installed in its 12-gauge barrels. Using 3/4-ounce loads, I can shoot thousands of rounds in that gun in a short time and suffer neither stress nor pain.

Recoil pads have long been used to soak up a bit of the recoil, and a number of good ones are available from companies such as Sims Vibration Laboratory, Pachmayr and Uncle Mike's. Most pad manufacturers offer screw-on and slip-on styles.

Another way to reduce recoil is to lighten up on shot charge weight and shot velocity. English shotgunners have for decades considered 1 1/16-ounces of shot exiting the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun at 1,200 fps plenty for taking pheasants out to 40 yards, and some consider the one-ounce load adequate. Most American hunters would not be caught dead in the field with such light loads.

Most of the upland wingshooting we do can be handled quite nicely with shot charges weighing anywhere from 3/4-ounce to 1 1/8 ounces, with velocities in the 1,100 to 1,200 fps range; heavier charges and higher speeds serve mainly to punish the shooter rather than the target.

A target load such as the Low Recoil/Low Noise loading of the AA shell from Winchester does a great job on doves and quail, and its extremely hard shot delivers patterns of better quality than softer shot found in some field loads.

Lighter loads will get the job done in the turkey woods as well. Some hunters are not satisfied unless they turn a gobbler's head to jelly with a handful of shot fired from a shell as long as a Roman candle, but a 1 1/4-ounce charge of No. 6s fired from a 20-gauge shotshell will consistently kill gobblers out to 35 yards. The standard baby magnum loading of 1 1/2 ounces of shot in the 2 3/4-inch 12-gauge shell will extend your range to 40 yards, which is probably as far away as 90 percent of the gobblers are taken each spring.