Bill Burkett
Active member
I am enjoying all the posts as the various seasons open and reports begin to trickle back. With nothing contemporary to report, I was looking back over my hunting logs and found a story I never could sell to a magazine about the need for one-handed shotguns for those with only one useful arm. Something I experienced from a cervical disk fracture back when the Billary Gang was getting anti-gun legislation passed. I knew one veteran with a missing arm, die-hard branter, who used a long 12 double handily (pardon the pun) with his over developed right arm musculature. Another who had to toss his pump in the air, catch and shuck it, and then toss it again to grab in a shooting grip...follow up shots not that easy. Here's an anecdote of how I dealt with it--maybe somebody out there is designing one handed shotguns for sporting use but I've never heard of them...
The big wooden drift boat glided out of the Chehalis River into a brushy slough, quiet as a canoe under the guide's skilled oars. My hunting partner had his thumb on the hammer of his beautifully kept old ‘97 Winchester. The only sound was the swish of the oars. When we swept into the final turn, there was a frozen moment while a dozen loafing mallards on a sandbar 20 yards away registered our intrusion. Then the explosion, exactly like a covey rise. When it was over, I had two fat mallard drakes and my partner was bemoaning the tight choke of his old pump. The guide handed me a heavy greenhead in bright winter plumage.
"That gun of yours is just about perfect for this," he said.
But tell it to the anti-gun media. For that matter, tell it to gun snobs. My “ugly duckling” semi-automatic exactly fits the profile of a so-called assault shotgun. (They called ‘em riot guns when I was a kid.)
"Steel threes," I said. "A 2 3/4-inch gun, improved cylinder and not even magnum loads!" Everything selected to minimize recoil. That ugly little gun looked as good to me as a hand-built English double: a dull black Remington 1100, 20-inch barrel, black synthetic pistol-grip stock angled like an M-16. I removed the magazine extension and plugged the factory magazine to legal waterfowl capacity.
My choices that year boiled down to hunting with the "assault shotgun"...or not hunting at all. My left arm was virtually useless from nerve damage from a herniated spinal disk. I shot that brace of mallards one-handed with the stock snuggled under my thick spongy cervical collar. I almost missed that entire season before my neurosurgeon agreed I could try to hunt--if I absolutely promised not to raise my left arm above shoulder level. Every time I did, the nerve trunk to my left arm rubbed over the fractured disk “like a frayed rope on a rusty bollard.”
You should have seen the look on our guide's face when I uncased the 1100 on the boat launch. Carefully inscrutable, I guess you’d call it. He seemed nervous about whether it was even legal. The pair of mallards won him over.
When I spent almost $500 on something usually featured in drug-war movies, my then-wife was sure I had gone clear round the bend. To humor the patient, she agreed to throw some clay birds. I smoked the first one she tossed.
"You used your left hand!" she said suspiciously.
"Did not!"
"You must have!"
I quit after a run of six straight. "Don't want to overstress the neck."
"You mean you want to quit while you're ahead."
"That, too."
In the only two hunting trips that injury-riddled season, I managed limits one-handed. The 1100 didn’t make me the deadliest one-handed shot in the west, but the ugly little gun retaught me the virtues of patience, open chokes and moderate loads that are usually associated with fine fowling pieces.
Thanks to the antigun media, a man in camouflage carrying a short black gun has become a modern-day bogeyman. But my grandmother always said beauty is as beauty does.
By her standard, my homely little gun is all graceful swan. It saved my season. But the antigun crowd never goes away; they’re back in full cry again. I am saddened that with our nation full of newly mangled veterans of foreign wars, I see no company building one-handed sporting shotguns for hunters with at least one remaining good arm.
