Guns For Girls

- Janet Menzies

Women are rightly renowned for their superpower of shopping and are therefore well able to lug large quantities of full (often very full) carrier bags from shop to car. Can you get the weekend shopping into the kitchen unaided? Then you can shoot with a 12-bore shotgun. The average weight of a 12-bore is around seven pounds, give or take a pound depending on the shooting discipline for which it is designed. A 20-bore is usually five or six pounds. A bag of flour weighs 2.2 pounds. Is the shooting industry seriously saying that a female gun is going to faint under the weight of an extra bag of flour?

For a long time, that has been exactly the attitude taken by shooting instructors, gun fitters and gun manufacturers. When I began shooting clays and pheasants in the 1980s, I had to wear boys’ breeks and my shooting day involved being courteously helped over stiles by charming retired colonels at least twice my age and half my fitness. And, of course, I shot with a 20-bore. The idea, in traditional sporting Britain, was that since girls were definitely not men, they were probably something similar to a boy and could be fitted up along those lines.

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