Any you guys ever boxed?
Try to throw a jab with your palm UP. At a speed bag. Your left jab, assuming you are right handed, is your lead hand. Aren't we told to use our left hand in shotgunning?
Natural, hunh?
Now try it like any boxer would.
What's easier to connect with a moving target?
I was terrible at boxing: I'm white, got a big nose, from the 'burbs, and I'm slow. I don't shoot well, either.
But I wouldn't be so dismissive of someone like Chris who has walked the walk.
Vic, I'm not sure the boxing analogy works. I'm not a golfer, but I took a golf class as a PE course in college. The most unnatural thing in the world, to me, is the way you grip a golf club--yet almost all golfers use that very unnatural grip.
That being said, maybe my resistance to the golf club grip had something to do with the fact that I'd been gripping baseball bats for about 15 years before I ever picked up a golf club.
Another example of what seems natural vs unnatural: How do most of us throw something? Like we'd throw a baseball, right? Did cavemen throw rocks at game the same way? We may think so, and it certainly seems "natural"--although maybe that has something to do with exposure to baseball. But watch a fast pitch softball pitcher in action (a game that, sadly, has mostly disappeared--for men, at least). The underhand motion appears very unnatural, yet it's also significantly easier on the arm and shoulder. The fast pitch pitcher can throw game after game, with little or no rest in between. Some of you may remember the four man traveling team, the King and his Court. Pitcher Eddie Feigner could throw a significantly more air-resistant softball faster than major league fastballers can throw a baseball. Easier on the arm, more effective in terms of velocity and certainly at least equal in accuracy . . . yet it feels anything but natural. Unless you're a softball pitcher.
Back to guns. I've been a doublegun shooter all my shooting life, mostly sxs but some OU as well. Then, a few years back, I had a chance to pick up a 16ga A-5 (standard weight, not Sweet 16) at a very attractive price. That was the first autoloader I'd ever owned. I'd heard that one can either shoot those hump-backed Brownings or they can't. Apparently I'm one of the guys who can, because that gun seemed more "natural" to me--at least on a skeet field--than anything I'd ever shot before. I followed it with a couple of Sweet 16's. Same feeling, same results. But they did not convert me to toting A-5's after birds, because they simply don't feel right as hunting guns. Might have been different if I hadn't been conditioned to the feel, in the field, of a doublegun.
Last edited by L. Brown; 04/16/12 08:11 AM.
