Another thread got me thinking about this and I tho't I'd put down a couple things I've found out, by trial and error, about the way I grip a shotgun when shooting. There are two aspects I will address..............the shape of the grip, and how tightly I hold the gun in my hands. These are just things I have found to be true for me, and the personal experiences of anyone is welcomed, and appreciated.
As I mentioned many times before, in my experience, straight gripped guns and heavy loads are not compatible, as it relates to shooting my best. I found this out many years ago when I bought an A grade A H Fox, 12 gauge, 3" chambers, 32" barrels and a straight grip. It was fitted with a serviceable recoil pad. I found that when I shot it I got a lot of gun movement in my hands.............enough so to be disconcerting and causing me to be slower in getting the gun back on for the second shot, whether it be to kill a second duck with the second barrel, or try again after a miss. My 9 lb. 7 oz. HE Fox does not "jump around" like this when I shoot the same heavy loads in it, it being a pistol-grip gun. I shoot heavy guns well, my main target gun weighing 9 lbs. 3 oz., and I tend to hold a gun rather loosely and let it recoil as it will, not liking to try and manhandle the recoil by holding it tightly into my shoulder. This does not contribute positively to good shooting, IMO. Hand strength would likely be a factor in this, and being a farmer that has pulled wrenches most of my life, I think my hand strength is not lacking, but certainly there are some much stronger than I. Nash Buckingham comes to mind. He was a big man, strong and athletic, and liked straight gripped Super Foxes, so evidently this wasn't an issue for him.
The other issue with how we hold a shotgun is a bit more technical. I found out this personal tenet only after building a pattern plate on my farm. I am a perfectionist as far as regulation of patterns goes, with doubleguns, of course. And with a single or double barreled gun, the plate enables me to determine if the gun is shooting where I'm looking, or not. I found that with S x Ss, particularly the lightweight ones, how tightly I hold the gun affects regulation greatly. As many know, the gun begins to recoil at the instant the shot charge begins movement down bore, and enough of the recoil occurs while the shot charge is still in the barrel to affect where it hits after it's downrange. A S x S recoils horizontally in the direction of the barrel being fired............the right barrel being fired causes the gun to recoil right, and vice versa, because of it's distance off the centerline axis of the barrel set (imagine a line dead under the center of the top rib and midway from top to bottom of the barrels). Of course, the reason this is important is that if the barrels were joined truly parallel, neither would print it's pattern at point of aim. The barrels are joined in convergence, towards the muzzles, to counteract the lateral forces of recoil on the pattern placement. Now to the point. How tightly we hold the S x S determines to a degree how much it recoils away from that axis, and results in where it prints it's pattern laterally, and to a small degree, vertically. I have found that, in every instance, my holding a lightweight S x S too tightly causes it to crossfire it's patterns. "Manhandling" it doesn't allow it to recoil horizontally enough to place the patterns atop each other, which is the ideal scenario. I can shoot the plate and see this without question.
So, how do
YOU hold a shotgun, and have you ever patterned it to see if holding it differently causes the pattern to shift? I have a shooting buddy that grips his Beretta so tightly that sometimes I expect it to holler "Ouch!" before he calls "pull". Consistency is key to top shooting, but finding out where the gun is shooting, beforehand, is ultra-important.
Just a bunch of rambling............feel free to ignore it if you'd like.
SRH
