I Had the Scary if Uneventful Range Day

[David in MN]

Planned to go miss some skeet. I took my wife's cousin and uncle. My father in law asks if we will take the shotgun he has had repaired (his father's Browning ancient Browning A5) just to test. Sure.

Cousin gets up to the first stage and shoots a round. No eject. He'd put 2 rounds in which is technically a no-no but a lot of guys do 2 at a time to fiddle less with the gun. He suffers the nastiest stovepipe double feed I've ever seen and the gun is seized shut. I'm not proud of the solution and we wound up cutting out the double feed (a live shell) fron the bottom with a razor. Retired the gun for the day to go back to the gunsmith. If I'm honest it's a clunky design and I get the sentimentality but there's no reason to use it.

Cousin gets his other shotgun, a 20 gauge pump and steps up to the line. This time click and no bang. I insisted he either show me a dud or do a round count to prove a feed failure. Sure enough, 1 round missing. Now we need to assess. We have a push rod with offset handle on the range and out pops a live round. That's what happens when you put a 20 gauge shell in your dad's 12 gauge gun you grabbed by accident. This is the  of the shotgun world. Had he pumped in another live round we would have likely blown up the gun and been on our way to the ER.

Fortunately the range safety standards kept us from a disaster. It's easy to understand pulling the wrong gun from the back of the pickup after fiddling with a stoppage for 20 minutes. And cousin was able to laugh off being the dumb guy and be thankful we had a clearing procedure to prevent something bad. We then had a fun time missing.

It's a good reminder to be safe at the range and if something feels off clear the weapons and do a basic safety check. I knew what to do but it's also because I've seen a 1911 seize because 1911s don't shoot .45 GAP. I've also seen new shooters who thought that .38, .38 Super, and .380 ACP were kinda the same. Some of us might laugh but I get a little paranoid about this stuff because I might bring both a .308 and a 6.5 Creedmoor. You can have a boo-boo doing that.

I did everything right and it was still a near miss. But you're better off with egg on your face than blood.

[Redman]

2 rounds in the gun a no-no? When I shot skeet I did it all the time. I shot 12 ga. 28 ga. and 410 ga. skeet. On all stations where doubles were shot I loaded 2 rounds. I used auto loaders, pumps, side by side doubles and over and under doubles. No doubles only one round. It's hard to shoot doubles when you have only one round in the gun and two targets flying. I've seen it done though.......once. Two targets smoked with one round.

Agree no doubles, two rounds in the gun, unnecessary.

[archer]

at the range i work at, when you are doing single trap you load 1 round. only when you are shooting double trap can u load 2 rounds.

[David in MN]

We were shooting singles but I'll confess it's not unusual for people at our club to load 2 to shoot a single high house and a single low house back to back. Technically not what you're supposed to do but we look the other way if people stay in the shooting box pointed in a safe direction. Speeds things up and the arthritics have less time trying to open their guns.

But we also have a club rule that new guns or recently repaired guns of all types are loaded with one round to start. That is a rule I like and a good procedure to follow when you aren't familiar with the weapon. Especially with a gun that was just fixed because it had a malfunction problem.