Towngun

I don't believe any reference to barrel length was implied other than the association between open chokes and skeet guns from earlier times. Yes we have moved on and sadly moved onto steel shot which is being foisted upon us (without peer reviewed science). Open chokes have come full circle and are now back in discussion.

I have a 26-inch barrelled Miroku Skeet with open chokes. It is light and a delight to use and carry. I sold it and regretted the sale so much so I relocated it and purchased it back. It is my conviction you will hit more than you will miss. It is with this gun that I baged my best decoyed pigeon day of 115 birds. Most driven game is shot well within 25 yards and therefore within the skeet guns capacity. There is a lot of fashion rather than science in the shooting world and Robert Churchill became a wealthy man with his 25" barrels in the 1920's. Remember, sadly steel shot is on its way. Steel does not deform and holds its pattern. It cannot be constriction by chokes and so the age of open chokes maybe once again upon us. Early game guns did not have choke and certainly with steel unconstricted shot offers a safer passage down the walls of a shotgun barrel.

First, it's worth noting that shooting styles and preferences have evolved over time. In the 1970s, for example, many aspects of today's shooting discussions would have seemed unnecessary to consider and remember the great Edwardian game shots all used open chokes and later Churchill made fortune with 25" barrels, which became "de rigueur" on the sporting field. Let’s break down some key points on the subject. Practical Considerations: Lightness and space within a shooting hide are essential for comfort and ease of movement. These aspects, while simple, can make a significant difference during longer shooting sessions, where physical comfort directly influences focus and accuracy. A 7.5 lb sporter may not be welcome towards the end of your day. As always there are many aspects to a days shoot, equal to the bag. Technical Factors: When it comes to achieving effective kills, precision in pellet strike is paramount. A well-formed skeet pattern within effective range is particularly challenging for game to evade. In terms of range, skeet shooting is most effective within 20 to 25 yards, while a quarter choke can reliably extend up to 30 yards. Using an open choke increases the number of kills by approximately 25% within range, arguably compensating for any potential losses due to range limitations by boosting performance on closer shots. Most game is closers ranges than many are capable of assessing. Nontoxic Shot Considerations: With the shift toward nontoxic ammunition, particularly steel shot, there are important mechanical factors to bear in mind. Steel does not compress the way lead does, and attempts to force compression can increase pressure within the barrel, potentially impacting both performance and safety. Given the high volume of shooting and the popularity of bird resale, there’s a strong case for pairing open chokes with steel shot to maximize efficacy and minimize wear on the firearm. Don't follow fashion - create it or maybe repeat it.

Guns follow fashion with no absolute right or wrong. Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion explains the relationship between a physical object and the forces acting upon it. Heavy load, light guns equals felt recoil. The move from 30 grams to 28 grams (in clays) was based of health and the impact of recoil. Ever considered Brown Ball Syndrome? Watch a video of a shot taken, slow it up and see the head movement. Your brain is suspended as a jelly in its skull box. We know the dangers to footballers and boxers. Consider 100 rounds of sporting clays! Its a phd thesis awaiting a medical student who shoots. Loads: If you shoot clays you of course know that 28 gram or a 24 gram is better than most men or women behind them. If "you" miss, it is you that misses and not the cartridge. Thus, for a light side by side 24 or 28 will be plenty and if you miss it will you who missed not the cartridge. Other: The right hand side by side can greatly aid left eye dominance, especially when used with a barrel guard. You can keep both eyes open and the alignment of the barrels will deny the left eye pulling the gun off. The barrel break is shorter and far quicker to reload. Cleaning the Side by Side is quicker. On a walked up day, shooting is one small part. Weight and carriage of the gun in a bigger part. What purpose a missed bird through fatigue? I shoot both O&U and Side by Side. I like and enjoy both. My Side by Side is an 1960 AYA No2 sidelock. As you may know it a copy of the Holland and Holland Royal and as close to a Best English gun as I'm likely to get. Whilst, I won't say don't follow fashion I will say don't be a slave to fashion. Put on your tweeds, enjoy nostalgia and maybe just maybe our Edwardian forebears had a few things right. For future reading get a copy of one or all three of Gough Thomas books, a grreat sportsman, former Editor of the Shooting Times and expert of the Side by Side.

Dear Field Sports Enthusiasts Countryside Alliance member GWCT BASC Are you a member of the above and you concerned over your representative bodies lack of response to events? If so feel free to copy and paste the following along with your membership number to your representative body: I am writing to you today because I believe that we share a common goal, and that by working together, we can achieve something truly remarkable. As a concern to us all in the past Wild Justice has launched a numbers of spurious court cases against various aspects of field sports. Fortunately, to date these actions have been dismissed by a wise judiciary. However, Wild Justice has a command and dominance of electronic media and access to a youthful internet audience and their funding via Crowd Funding. The opposite is true of your members who look to you to lead them in these issues. Defamation is a rich man/woman’s sport, win or lose but with a Crowd Funded option this deterrent no longer inhibits Wild Justice or Chris Packham. Alarmingly there is now more than £100K amassed for Chris Packham’s two actions for defamation, allowing him to litigate without financial constraint. What are your organisations doing to counter this threat? Should he win his case, especially against Field Sports Channel then it will be open season on all Field Sports. United we stand, divided we fall. Do not desert your fellow sportsmen, I assure you your members will not forgive inaction at a time of need. It is not for me to propose that you join forces with representative bodies, but I believe it would be a grave error if you did not mobilise your collective membership, marketing knowledge, financial resources, and expertise, to create a powerful force to raise a defence fund equal to that of Wild Justice. A fund that shooting folk will support in the knowledge that it will be directed against a common enemy. Together, you all can achieve much more than you can alone. Please reassure me that this issue has not been missed. Best regards

The sale of game has never been high - my belief is large bags are obscene and guns should each take a quota for their own distribution. T SO YOU WANT SCIENCE? Here is a story worthy of note. You could headline it: “Ducks health of greater importance than humans”. There is so little science surrounding lead and steel shot that the following real evidence issue jumped out. I read a letter in the shooting press about a Dr warning a patient that they picked up some lead shot following an MRI scan but had it been steel shot ingested from game meat then the MRI scan may well have killed him! The “magnetic” field from the scan affects steel and some metals (not lead) and therefore can cause any metal inside your body to move as it is attracted to the “magnetic” field, with potentially fatal consequences! This is why it's important to tell your radiographer (a health professional trained to perform imaging procedures) if you have any metal in your body. Of course anyone who has eaten wildfowl and ingested steel shot would be unaware of this and so would not be able to disclose this fact and avoid this potentially fatal health risk. Thus is it better for a duck to ingest lead or a human to ingest steel?

Sadly lead is dead but I would like to offer up this eulogy at its funeral: there is no UK evidence that spent Lead shot pellets are available to the natural feeding patterns of UK wildfowl, other than by human intervention by the researcher’s engaged by the UK conservation bodies. There is however, evidence of concerted attempts to subvert the scientific process. No evidence that would stand up in court has been presented to support the claim that wildfowl pick up spent lead shot pellets in the wild in the UK. Not a penny of the £20m annual funds flowing to our representatives has been spent on forensic investigations of the false claims against Lead. BASC (around 1998) pledged to the WWT, the RSPB and DEFRA, that it would adopt the recommendations of the AEWA and together they urged the government of the day to sign up. The implementation of the AEWA banned lead ammunition over wetlands. This is where a bond of compliant allegiance, between our representatives, a dutiful shooting press, and the Conservation industry, has led us. The nods and winks between the consenting parties have been largely covert. But together they have placed shooting in a political cul-de-sac at the government’s pleasure. Implicit in the acceptance of the AEWA protocol was, that over a period of 20 years or so, BASC would endeavour to promote non-lead ammunition alternatives with a view to completely replacing lead by around now. Their performance (especially) over the last 7 years have underwritten this intention. Is this the reason being that such research has not been conducted in the UK? The architect of this pledge was the recently retired CEO of BASC who tireless laboured behind the scenes for 30 years to bring the pledge to fruition. He has retired to FACE EU to continue his ‘international’ work. He is now embedded in the EU via his position as treasurer of FACE EU. The pledge will now be pursued in secret within the EU Commission. He and they will not give up. The entire debate over Lead ammunition in the UK has been conducted under a shadowy haze of political manipulation conducted by the Conservation industry. Unfortunately, a section of the UK shooting representative class has acted as surrogate to the conservation lobby in the matter. They have never called for the research programme described above. Until professional, disciplined, transparent, independent, protocols are determined in order to commission UK research, any imposition of controls over lead ammunition must be viewed as simply dishonest. The shooting public are fully aware of the deception. The message to the representatives classes is ‘get it right or go away, you are a danger to us all’. The abject failure of the ‘Pledge’ gambit has made this plain. It has made equally plain that the 'cry' for unity and forming one body is pure rhetoric. Each time the shooting bodies have acted in unity in the recent past it was in secrecy and wrong. I am thinking in particular of the FACE UK debacle. We assume that our representatives are intelligent people, yet what they are doing does not make sense, begging the question; what are they not telling us? Worst of all, perhaps they do not know themselves. Until complete openness displaces the back room machinations of the last 30 years any cry of ‘unity is strength’, will be seen as cover-up tactics leaving the individual shooter with nowhere to turn. BACKGROUND DOCUMENTATION OF INTEREST No 1 Quote from: - DEFRA First report period 1999 and 2002 - Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds. “The UK, through BASC, supported the AEWA/Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation of the EU east European workshop (October 2001) on lead shot replacement, through participation, advice and demonstration.” *Management of Human Activities (4) - Page (28) 30 – (top) *See the attached DEFRA AWEA report Pdf. File. BASC have been an active participant in the group-think against lead lending uncritical support for the AEWA and implicit support for the eventual ‘phasing’ out of any use of lead ammunition and its replacement with steel. THE BRISTOL CLUB Over the last 30 years or so, a rather stealthy club has coalesced. Its group think formed the anti-lead agenda and anointed the junk science that favours its objectives. They work together and socialise together. They have worked un-molested on the fringe of mainstream Government policy, seen only as bottom feeders in strategic terms. Useful nevertheless as 'feel good' fodder for voters. The have a triple-lock on DEFRA’s wildlife policy and are the gatekeepers to the decisions for conducting research and the flow of grant money. There are some thousands employed in administration and supervision roles, and if you include the grants paid to fellow travelling NGO's this is a very significant cost to taxpayers. I call it the Bristol Club. Its members are: - Tim Andrews/DEFRA - Temple Quay House, Bristol, Wildlife division. He is also official DEFRA observer of the Lead Ammunition Group The other main members are: – AWEA – BASC – RSPB – WWT Natural England is of course a welcomed resource it can rely upon when in need of support to protect against any 3rd party threat on the flanks. Also in the frame is the BBC Wildlife dept. Bristol. Most useful in presentational matters. BACKGROUND DOCUMENTATION OF INTEREST No 2 By Bert Lenten, Executive Secretary – AWEA – opening Address [AEWA – HARRADINE Pdf. “However, an important - I would even say - the most important, step in this development is moreover the agreement that has been reached with the hunting community on the need of phasing out the use of lead shot in wetlands, an issue which used to be opposed by most hunters and regarded as a threat for hunting in the past, and which is meanwhile considered as the hunters’ contribution to conservation. Much awareness is raised by the hunting organisations themselves, which are active in the process of phasing out the use of lead shot in wetlands; thus hunters in several countries have accepted the change towards using lead-free ammunition” The quote above is reflective of John Swift’s and John Harradine’s UK policy and indeed, they have both worked consistently and unchallenged in their quest to eliminate Lead Ammunition. Those who take the trouble to read the entire document will get the message. Arnold Chapkis Sept. 2013 This email is sent privately to a number of receipiants, however do feel free to pass this on to those of like mind. Please send your email address if you wish to be added the mail list.

I'm sure technology will offer up a solution. I'm not defending lead rather sceptical over steel which is being pushed by the shooting organisations perhaps in compensation for their shameful lack of consultation with cartridge manufacturers. I have found several plastic wads with a steel shot embedded deep in the wad and deep enough to contact the barrel. This is especially a risk at the separation of the wad petal which is where the wad is at its weakest. Gamebore have developed an approach by cutting their wad at a 45 degree angle so the wad petal overlaps at this point.

Once shooting organisation said no lead ban without new evidence. There is no new evidence and yet we now face a ban on lead. I have watched with a degree of scepticism the pro steel lobby but felt this to be rather one sided. I wish I was wrong. I have found this from an American gunsmith: Long-term use means you will likely have to buy a barrel. When you use steel (today’s steel loads are normally Chinese made) you are using a product that is harder than old barrels and nearly as hard as modern barrels. Eventually, you will get some scoring and scuffing in your bore. Ammunition manufacturers have fought to try to find ways from keeping steel and other very hard nontoxic products from embedding themselves into the wad and contacting the bore through wad slits. Their success has been limited. Buffering helps, reducing velocity helps, lowering shot size helps. Large non-compressible pellets slamming into your choke at 1200 – 1500 fps is a huge amount of stress to expect your barrel to absorb over time. Steel is so much less dense than lead that larger shot sizes and higher velocities are the only way to get it to perform acceptably. This is the exact thing to which we don’t want to subject our barrels. The problem is more pronounced with good stack barrel and side-by-side shotguns, which use thin wall barrels to save weight. Steel is not a huge safety issue, but there are some concerns. Steel rusts and attempting to shoot a welded together mass of pellets through your gun could mean a ringed barrel. Steel is also a problem if you bite into a pellet at mealtime, a boon to dentistry. Steel pellets embedded in trees have not found great favor with the timber industry, either. Browning has this to day about steel shot damage: “DAMAGE: In not all, but a number of instances a very slight ring will develop about 1-1/2" to 3" rearward of the muzzle. This ring is about .005 of an inch above the plane of the barrel, completely encircling the barrel. From our tests, we could determine no adverse effect on pattern or shot velocity because of this ring. Our conclusion is that the most significant objection, the slight ring, is entirely cosmetic. This 'ring' effect does not affect the function or safety of the firearm.” I cannot speak for other individuals, but I know I have no interest in buying or shooting a shotgun with a ringed barrel, cosmetic or not. Steel and fine shotguns do not mix well; steel and vintage shotguns do not mix at all, as far as I’m concerned. With the intermittent, unreliable availability of bismuth, there are only two viable choices for those seeking to protect vintage barrels while using no-tox shot today. They are Kent Tungsten-Matrix shotshells and the recently introduced Hevi-Shot “Classic Doubles” loads. Of the two, the Kent loads are closer to lead in density, 10.8 g/cc (lead considered 11.0 g/cc, showing as 11.35 g/cc on the periodic table). Both shotshell types are reviewed elsewhere, with the Kent shells being the current best of breed. This is not meant to dissuade you from steel shotshells in modern screw-choked shotguns specifically designed for their use. Hopefully, it should give you a little food for thought before stuffing steel shotshells into an older, fixed choke shotgun that you want to keep in top condition.

The art of pigeon shooting is to get under a flight line. For me mobility is therefore more important than kit. To carry large amounts of kit requires a quad bike or a 4X4 which will do more crop damage than the pigeon. Your farmer will be greatly relieved to see a pair of boots in preference to a set of tyres. I'd leave the 100kgs yomps to the SAS and unless you fancy two or three trips by 'Shanks's Pony" with the additional prospective weight of a further 50 - 100 dead pigeons, then I'd avoid too much stuff. Remember, many shooters are OCD over kit and this obsession is targeted by suppliers of kit. One gun, cartridges, hide, seat and a dozen decoys. Two days recognisance in ratio to one days shooting. Find the flight line and get under it.

I am already a syndicate member so thank you for the kind offer. It is a little out my area also. Very good luck with your new venture. Best regards Towngun

Increasing evidence links footballers brain damage with heading footballs. But what of shooting sports? If you watch video evidence of the impact of shogun recoil on the head or perhaps you have taken an iphone video of someone shooting and then slow the video up, you will notice considerable head movement. I would suggest there is cause for concern (research) and perhaps this adds weight to the suggestion that lighter loads should be considered i.e. 24 grams or 21 grams on health grounds? The most common immediate symptoms of a concussion are headache, confusion (fog like feeling), amnesia, seeing stars/dizziness, ringing in the ears, slurred speech. Later they may be light sensitive, have vertigo, memory complaints, irritability (common in many clay shooter without a concussion). But consider the longer term impact?

Yes a fight pond is an excellent shooting proposition. Two automatic feeders and a modicum of water and duck will find you. Shoot the pond ever two weeks, fill feeders and replace battery. Try google/earth maps and follow the river severn up, looking for pools – approach farmer. Let me know if you are forming a small syndicate?

Small shot gives a fuller pattern in all chokes.

On the subject of the Eley statement via Guns on Pegs: "Our lead shot for game cartridge contains 2% Antimony. This hardens the shot slightly helping reduce deformation during firing and as it travels down the barrel but means it is still malleable and will deform on impact thereby delivering very effective knockdown performance on game. Higher levels of Antimony, such as 5% used in premium clay cartridges, are ideal for breaking clays but harden the shot too much making it generally unsuitable for game shooting." And yet The new Eley Zeneth: Copper is electroplated to the lead to reduce pellet deformation as the shot goes down the barrel and through the choke of the gun. This ensures it maintains a superior pattern during flight, with more shot on target. Copper plated shot increases the impact power of the shot on the quarry. And so would this latter statement contradict the former?