I don't normally try to participate in conversations above my pay grade, but I'll offer my 2 cents here.
There's a thread here that explores the reasons folks got into SXS shotguns. A recurring theme is that the interest occurred early on and usually from a gift or the use of a double gun. WE, double gun enthusiasts, need to make a practice of gifting doubles to those we are bringing up.
Now, I am guilty of NOT doing that very thing. My boys used my doubles, but when It came time to give them a shotgun, damn if I didn't give them a Rem 870...
If I'd been thinking ahead, that gift would have been a SXS and they'd have burned up those thousands of red shotgun shells in a good double gun instead of three at a time through a plastic stocked pump. The 870s accomplished the task at hand, which was a new shotgun, but it ignored the larger picture of the lasting effect. I had full run of nearly any kind of shotgun I wanted to shoot when I was growing up. When my dad gave me my double, that was it. It was my gun and I loved it. A lifelong obsession began.
I won't make that mistake with my grandson.
Guys like us, like them, buy them, look at them, clean them, put them away....
Youngsters use the heck out of them in order to become like us.
Want to see double gun sales go up? Start giving them away to young hunters. They can't help but fall in love with them.
Alan
