Letters

Letter of the month

Grouse about modern guns

The recent popularity for high-bird shoots has escalated the trend for long-barrelled, weighty game guns designed to cope with the heavy-load cartridges this type of sport necessitates.

There have always been fads for guns and this got me thinking. A couple of decades back, it was not uncommon to come across a ‘grouse gun’ advertised for sale in the shooting press. I believe that a grouse gun was reverse-bored, so that the heavier-choked barrel was fired first on the front trigger and the open-bored barrel by the rear trigger. This made good sense as, in theory, the first shot taken at a bird from an incoming pack