Crippled ducks, raffle tickets and an unusually lucky confluence of events

I am not a gun nut. I do not salivate over the latest guns. My guns are tools that help me put meat in our freezer - neither race cars to brag about nor economy models to hide in shame.

But I have to admit it: For a couple months now, I have wanted to upgrade my shotgun.

Not that there's anything wrong with my Beretta Urika 391 - it's a damn good gun.

But this duck season, more than a quarter of the ducks I got were other hunters' cripples, which made me think about how many ducks I might be sending away crippled. And that got me thinking long and hard about what I could do to minimize wounding losses.

The most obvious is being able to hit your target dead-on, which means practice, practice, practice. But I kept running into one other inescapable fact: If I shot a 12 gauge instead of a 20 gauge, I'd be putting out more shot with every pull of the trigger, increasing my odds of landing a couple pellets in the ducks' lethal zones. Read more...
That's a hard thing to admit when you've prided yourself on telling everyone who mocks your 20 gauge that it can kill just as well as a 12 gauge - that you just have to be more careful about accuracy because you don't have the same number of pellets.

It's even harder to say when you know there's a certain set of people who actually respect you a lot for using a more modest gauge.

But pride be damned. I decided it was time to join the 12 gauge club.

I started to covet the new Benelli Vinci. It's gotten nice reviews for performance and low felt recoil, and with my scrawny girl shoulders, I really wasn't looking forward to the extra beating I might take with a 12 gauge.

When our friend Jim invited us to a duck dinner - you know, one of those fundraisers where you drink too much beer and buy too many raffle tickets in hopes of winning one of the dozens of guns they're giving away - I thought maybe this was my chance.

When we arrived, I circled the room looking at the loot. Not a Vinci in sight.

Oh well.

But I did see that the giveaway gun for people making installment payments on their life membership that night was a big black 12 gauge Beretta 3901. I didn't know a thing about this model, but I picked it up and raised it to my shoulder. It felt good, like my 391. So I dropped $200 for the third installment of my life membership and braced for the inevitable disappointment.

Usually I win nothing. Once I won a mallard print. Snore. But something weird happened at this dinner. You know how there's always one table that seems to win a disproportionate number of the guns and other big prizes? At this dinner, we were that table.

Jim won a gun. His son won a gun. His son's friend won a gun. Jim won another gun when he was still busy doing paperwork on his first gun. We laughed and laughed and laughed because it was just so unreal.

When it came time for the life member drawing, I placed my ticket squarely in front of me on the table and waited as the emcee called out the numbers. Would our table's good fortune swing my way?

"One!" Check.

"Eight!" Check.

"Two!" Check, but this is usually the last number that matches.

"Five!" Hmm...

"Zero!"

I screamed.

I leapt out of my chair and bounced like Tigger all the way to the stage, where I grabbed my new gun, and then I skipped with it all the way back to the paperwork table. Nothing like a gracious winner, eh? But, dang, I'd finally won a gun.

Of course, I didn't get to take it home that night, because California has a ten-day waiting period, so when we win guns, we have to find time later to go to a gun shop that handles the transaction.

I hate delayed gratification.

But it gave me time to think: Should I keep this gun? Or should I trade it in for a Vinci? When you win a gun at one of these dinners, you can usually apply the wholesale value of the gun you've won toward another gun in the store that handles the transaction. That might add up to a $400-$500 discount on a Vinci, and my income tax refund would be enough to cover the remaining $1,000 or so.

I didn't know anything about the 3901, but I Googled it when I got home and found that Field & Stream's Philip Bourjaily had counted it among the "Ten Best Bargains in Shotgunning."

The 3901, it turned out, was a plain-Jane version of the 390, which is the predecessor to my 391. And Bourjaily thought pretty highly of it.

"As a 391 owner, it pains me to admit that the 390/3901 is every bit as good a gun and a little sturdier," Bourjaily wrote. "Its reputation for high-volume, low-recoil durability on sporting clays ranges and Argentine dove fields is well deserved."

Well, that sounded pretty good! Maybe new and improved (and more expensive) models aren't always the smartest buy.

I mulled it over for a couple weeks when I was too busy to get to the gun store anyway, and today was the day my gut answered the question: Are you nuts, Holly? You won a good gun. Count your blessings and bring that thing home.

So I went to the gun shop and got the clock ticking. My 12 gauge adventure begins in ten days.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010