January/February 2009

Gun Room
One Gun
by Steve Smith

 have always maintained that shotguns are like golf clubs – each club is different and meant for a specific purpose and type of shot (though I’ve found that they are all identical in the ease with which they can be broken over the human knee and thrown great distances into water hazards), so we need several guns – though not necessarily 14, like clubs – and that old chestnut about “beware the man who shoots one gun” was something quaint from the last century made up by some guy who had only one gun. And wasn’t that a long sentence?

So, naturally, like a lot of you, I have accumulated guns; guns for ducks and grouse and pheasants and prairie birds and things like quail-in-the-rain-behind-a-pointer-in-the-late-season guns. And there’s nothing wrong with this, although there’s been some disagreement on that score voiced from time to time over the dinner table. And in the family room. And sometimes while I’m pulling out of the driveway to go to work and A Close Relative By Marriage is running alongside my truck, disagreeing. The main reason we’ve historically felt the need for so many guns for special purposes is actually related to the chokes – your M/F pheasant gun wasn’t going to do the job in the woodcock thickets – all of which was negated with the advent of screw-in chokes.

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