Fighting a bad cold here today (sigh!) so I'm a bit housebound. Got a landscaping crew in my front yard abusing the neighborhood (with their equipment backup alarms) and while they are coming down the home-stretch for this job (building two rather large granite boulder retaining walls to replace a very dead juniper hedgerow [voles...curse them!]), I'd normally be out there keeping track of things but...oh well.

I'd like to discuss gun weights and then their specific applications in the field if I might. My more specific question would be fairly simple...does half a pound really make much difference in an upland gun?

I'm already very comfortable with the fact that 6lbs in the uplands is almost ideal (at least for me). What has surprised me is how sensitive I've become to anything exceeding (or failing to meet) that rather arbitrary number (a half a pound under 6-lbs and things start to get fairly whippy (unless I really concentrate).

Walking all day with a gun (or at least most of it) with a fervor {approaching something almost religious} has led me to several revelations...I certainly can carry heavier guns and still succeed, but at the end of the day things start to deteriorate a bit. That last trail might not be as productive as it could be or...it might not even get walked. Mind you, age is becoming a component here as well (as is conditioning) so I understand that we're discussing "the law of diminishing returns" here to large degree.

Ruffed grouse are the very definition of "light-skinned" game and light guns with minimal chokes and light loads seem to do just fine for me. Move up the scale to prairie birds and everything changes. For that game, faster and heavier shells (along with some more-serious "choke") seems to be called-for and at that point I'm looking to haul something along in the 6 1/2 to 7 lb range (6 3/4 lbs is an excellent compromise IMHO). I can do heavier guns here as well but the walking becomes much tougher in the afternoon for me (an 7 1/4 lb Parker hammergun last year was noticeably unwieldy after 5 or 6 hours of walking).

I have heavier shotguns, of course, everything from pumps to hammers to stack-barrels, but I tend to keep them for situations were the shooting is more frequent and the walking is less-so (waterfowl, turkey, targets, etc.).

What do the cognoscenti here have to say on this subject? Am I all wet here?

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

6lbs11 versus 7lbs6....

Last edited by Lloyd3; 03/13/26 11:30 AM. Reason: Corrected gun weights