I went into a pawn shop today with nothing much on my mind but looking through the used guns. While there, a small barreled shotgun caught my eye.
It's an NEF Partner, in .410. I've been looking for one of these for several months and they're scarce as hens teeth in these parts. Lots of daddys and pawpaws are hunting with kids, and a small, single shot .410 is just the ticket for a young'un and the squirrel woods.
The .410 is the only shotgun I know that's labeled by caliber. The rest are gauges, which is the number of round balls you can make with a pound of lead. For example, the 12 gauge shotgun. If you take a pound of lead and make 12 round balls, they come out at an average diameter of 0.729 inch, and that's the diameter of a 12 gauge barrel. It's all very esoteric, and you can read about it in Wikipedia. If the .410 was listed as a gauge, it would be a 67.5 gauge. (talk about useless knowledge).
A lot of people consider the .410 to be an expert's caliber. That's probably true when you're talking about wing-shooting. But, the .410 is a good caliber to start off a young recoil sensitive boy who wants to hunt with PawPaw and has shown that he's safety conscious enough to carry his own firearm. Turn a kid loose in a white-oak bottom with a .410 and a pocket full of shells, and the squirrels will know he's there, I promise. It's a good way to start a kid on small game hunting. In a year or two, he'll tire of the .410 and be ready to step up to a 20 gauge.
For under a hundred bucks out the door, I'm sure that the little shotgun will see lots of use with young boys over the next ten or twelve years.
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