My Dad was a firm beleiver in making the first shot count and even firmer on gun safety, so my first gun was a Winchester mod. 67A .22 and first shotgun was a Stevens mod. 220 20 ga. hammerless single. I stated in the other thread that I felt a 20 ga. was more likely to instill confidence than a .410, but that Stevens mod. 220 was perhaps the tightest choked gun I've ever seen. When I managed to hit a rabbit or bird or clay target with it, it was obliterated, but I missed more than I hit. When I was 16, I checked the pattern by taking 35 long paces from a large frost killed pumpkin and firing. There was a fist sized hole in the pumpkin with a few pellets around the fringes. Seeing that, I didn't feel quite so bad about my misses on moving targets. I usually averaged 8 to 10 out of 25 in our informal backyard skeet shoots back then, and could easily more than double that with my Dads Rem. 870 16 ga. with Poly Choke opened up to Improved Cyl. I suppose the lesson here is we could inadvertantly handicap our kids by saddling them with the wrong gun and possibly discourage them to the point of losing interest. Not always though. I was busy memorizing ballistics tables when I should have been studying my algebra.
