I grew up on a farm in a farming community, surrounded by farms, orchards & vineyards. Those were different times. No firearms licence needed, no firearms registration, no age limits for shooters & no climate of fear of guns & phoning the police at hearing their report.

As a consequence of many pests who ate whatever the grower had I had a rifle almost grafted onto my arm at a young age. A model 1B Lithgow single shot .22 long rifle. I became deadly with that thing & was welcome on all the properties around because I got the difficult pests as well as the easy ones.

As a youngster I always scorned the use of scatter guns & Dad had a Beretta single shot 12g that I tried shooting but I tried shooting it like a rifle. This just proved to me that the gun was as useless as I had thought. So I stuck to my ever growing arsenal of rifles that could shoot further & ever further into the next zip code.

Later in life I was working maintenance on a big citrus & pecan orchard which had a pest problem with birds. Right up my alley.
After getting the control permits & satisfying all the now legalities I ripped it up them with the rifle but soon found that they would not sit still & cop it sweet. They flew around overhead & I soon worked out that a shotgun may have a use after all. I went & bought an old very cheap H&R single called the duck. Knowing how useless a shotgun was I didn't want to invest too much coin in this folly. It was only a look see if the things had become something more useful than I ever found them to be.

Well this old 36" barreled H&R showed me & taught me to shoot like a shotgun needs to be shot. Then I needed more fire power & I got another gun with 2 barrels seeing as how 2 is better than one. it just happened to be a SxS & cheap because shotguns were still on trial with me. This one proved its worth to me in a short time.

Now I am an addict.

O.M