Many
moons ago, I used to enjoy target shooting, mainly with long guns, but
occasionally with handguns as well. Now, sadly, after the banning of most types
of firearm in the UK following various shooting incidents, I have to settle for
getting a bit of practice every now and again on trips to the States.
One
type of firearm that is still legal
in the UK is a shotgun, despite it being so beloved of bank robbers of yore,
when the barrel or barrels would be sawn off for ease of concealment.
Doing
this does have a number of drawbacks, such as decreasing the velocity and
accuracy of the projectile, and wildly increasing both the spread of the shot and the recoil. There’s even a scene in a 2012 Brad Pitt movie, Killing Them Softly, where a shotgun used in a robbery
has been sawn off so short you can
see the ends of the cartridges protruding from what little there is left of the
barrels.
Back
when I was target shooting with rifle, I was advised not to fire shotguns, as
this would alter my technique. Shooting a rifle is much more about stillness, about taking up a position that
allows you to relax and still be aiming correctly at the target. Using a shotgun
is all about trying to hit a moving target, so you’re anticipating where the
target is going to be, rather than
where it is now.
But,
as I haven’t done any competition shooting for many years, there was no excuse not
to finally give shotgun a try. For this I went to Cloudside Shooting Grounds
near Congleton in Cheshire for a taster session.
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| Photo: Cloudside |
The
club has a fantastic setting overlooking the rolling countryside, although my
eye was more on the flying orange and black discs than it was on the view.
After a bacon butty in the temporary clubhouse marquee – apparently they had a
chimney fire in the clubhouse proper – I was handed a box of 20 gauge shotgun
shells and led to the first of the stands to give it a whirl.
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| Photo: Cloudside |
The
different stands had controllers for the various traps, involving the clays
either going directly away from the shooting position, directly towards, or off
at angles. The final one was a long left-to-right trajectory that apparently
classes as ‘difficult’.
What
surprised me was the almost total lack of recoil from the 20 gauge shotgun. I’d
been half expecting a bruised shoulder, but there was nothing to cause it. And
as long as you keep your cheek resting lightly on the comb of the stock rather
than pressed hard against it, nothing to worry your face, either.
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| Photo: Cloudside |
Getting
my head round the slow velocity of the shot took a bit of doing, but tracking
ahead of the clay and waiting for it to fall into my sight picture was not as
difficult as I’d been expecting.
As
for how many did I hit? Enough for a decent-sized clay pigeon pie, let me put
it that way!
And
will I be giving clay shooting another try? Very probably …
This
week’s Word of the Week is skeet,
which is the US name for clay pigeon, but which also has a number of slang definitions,
such as something that’s generally displeasing, or displeasing due to being
insufficient. It’s a type of poker hand as well, also known as a freak or
nonstandard hand, which is generally considered an unpaired hand with three
cards including the 2, 7, and 9, and three cards in between. And finally, it’s the
slang term for a method of birth control. I’ll leave the mechanics of that to your
imaginations!
