doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Doubles for young'uns

I would not start a 9 year old boy on a SxS. I started my (now 14 year old son) at 9 with a .410 Topper. This is fine for hand-thrown clays. A friend lent me a Remington 1100 youth model in 20 gauge. It has nearly zero recoil. He shot that for nearly a year before we returned it. At 12 he started shooting a Parker VH with 7/8 oz handloads and he never looked back. I would look seriously at a gas auto in 20 gauge and let him shoot that for a few years before graduating to the SxS. Good luck. It's fun having a shooting buddy.

Hi, good info on all the above posts. I won't go into safety and all that, you know and don't need to be told again.

Anyway, my two sons are both SxS shooters, they have been since the age of 7. At that age they both had 20ga SxS's that fit their physical limits. One of my sons is a bit taller and stronger than the other and his gun now is a 12ga SxS, the other still has a 20ga.

Each kid is different as you jolly well know. But kids today are bigger and stronger than when we were growing up. So they can handle guns with a bit more heft and can take recoil better.

As I said, match the gun to the kid. But, IMO, for Gods sake stay away from those damn Single hammer guns!!

It all depends on when he's ready to shoot both bbls, that is up to you.

Here's my suggestion for a good starter gun, make and model up to you.

25" or 26" bbl, 20ga and as far as ST or DT and grip style all up to you and him. Same goes for chokes.

Anyway, good luck and thanks for introducing another kid to the shooting sports and doubleguns in general.

Just have a great time and enjoy them as much as possible!!

All the best!

Greg

R.C. do y'all have Academy Stores in Louisana ?

If so check out their 28&20 Gauge SxSs.

For the money they are light years ahead of the moder Stoegers.

I have aquired one for my Grandsons use.

They are Turk guns, but are warrantied thru Brileys in Houston.

Tricky Tricky. I DID buy my son (when 9 and 10 in 2 weeks) a new Yidilz .410 over and under last year. He has shot with it but it's still a bit long. I'm afraid I did fall foul of trying to get him shooting a wee bit early. The problem is that his shooting is so variable given 1) it's a .410 and 2) he's small and it's a bit big for him. So one has to coach carefully or they become disillusioned with missing all the time. Don't get me wrong he loves it but I think a 20 when he is a bit older is probably more appropriate...

Just my own experience!

T

I bought a Browning Citori youth model O/U for my son when he was about 8 years old. It is a 20ga. with 24" barrels, straight stock, screw in chokes, and weighs about 6 Lbs. I had to cut the stock about 1" but saved it for adding back as needed. It proved to be a great gun for him to learn on. He used it to shoot clays and hunt with until he was about 12 years old. He downed a lot of clays and pheasants with it. Now at 15 he has been using my old mint condition Browning 20ga. For his birthday this year I gave the gun to him to keep. He is a good shot at the range and in the field and I am very proud of how he handles a gun in either situation. Glad to hear another young boy is joining our ranks.

Bill G.

There was a 10 year old girl that was about 3 1/2 foot tall, of asian decent, at our local range. She was the grandaughter of a wellknown local shooter. The grandfather had a local gunsmith take a Huglu O/U .410 and cut the barrels to about 20-22" and the stock down to some rediculously short LOP and reshape it. That little girl would shoot that gun with her grandfather and a squad of old farts and stay right on par with them. I'm sure she's all grown up now and dating boys in college or something.

I watched a particularly recoil sensitive lady (she had experience shooting rifles)have her husband buy her a .410 1100 and get shooting, then go on to buy other guns and compete, now with a P-gun 3 barrel set.

So, when someone says a .410 won't work for a first gun, I think of those two.

lots of discussion about gauge, but nuttin bout ammo or weight? how does 3/4 ounce 12 gauge loads out of a seven pound gun sound?

I have to agree with Daryl about starting a kid with a single shot. A repeater, even a sxs is just too much responsibility too fast.

As far as what single shot to begin a future double-gunner on; I suggest the Savage Model 220 with no external hammer, and a slide safety to learn with. The changeover to the sxs will be seamless having learned on the same mechanism. The 220s are readily available on the gun sales/auction sites.

As for guage, I have mixed feelings. I started my boys with 20s because I remembered experiencing the disappointment of not being able to take game reliably with the .410 I started with. The 20 was too much gun for my boys at 8 or 10 so I guess it depends on the boy. If he can handle the 20 I'd go with that, if not, then the .410 certainly is an improvement over a Daisy air rifle! It may be that with reduced recoil loads available now, guage doesn't matter so much. Just my thoughts...Geo

Well, if the kid weighs 50 lbs and hefts a 7 lb gun, it would be like a 150 lb person lifting a gun much much heavier. I don't wanna say a 21 lb gun, but you get the picture. Most of the difficulties of hitting a target reliably by a small child seems more about ergonomics (gun fit, and weight) than gauge/pattern size, in most of the situations I've seen. That's why I bring up that highly customized .410 that little (and I mean very little) girl was shooting. She handled it like a full sized adult, because it was scaled down to fit her, in both size and weight. But as the weight goes down, the energy of the shell must go down to keep recoil under control. A gun under 5 lbs will recoil too much for a little kid with anything but a .410 shell, IMO.

IMO, little kids can be surprizingly good at hand/eye coordination tasks, often better than adults, especially ancient ones like us. Try playing one of those video games with a kid sometime. They run into limitations when we put a giant gun in their hands with the prejudged notion that they need a large bore to hit a clay or bird. I think they'll show you different.

A sometimes important consideration is that small hands be able to grip the gun and reach the trigger. Kids are properly taught to keep their finger off the trigger unless they are ready to shoot, a good thing, but they do this too while dad tries to fit the gun stock length. I have seen dads saw off a stock only to find son or daughter can't reach the trigger without removing their hand from the grip.