Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 410 bore

NO NO NO NO>>> and NO... a 20 ga or 28 maybe but NEVER a 410

state your reasons rost495... otherwise you are just babbling...

I know of a few halibut that have succumbed to a 410, and twice that many snakes.

I'm guessing rost's reasons are you want a kid to have success in their first attempts. Its a lot easier to have success with a 20 guage than it is a .410 simply because you're throwing quite a few more pellets downrange.

Can a kid shoot a .410 and be successful? Yes.
Are the odds higher with a 20 guage? My opinion is yes.

Although many of us started with a .410 (I actually started with a .22 with birdshot.), conventional wisdom now holds that it is more challenging to shoot accurately than a 20, hence it may be more discouraging to a beginner.

Well I own a half dozen other shotguns in 12 and 20 gauge and one 10 gauge and I still carry a .410 a couple of times a year and never felt handicapped using it. Of course I don't try and down ducks with it at 45 yards either.

This thread has be going again, think I might head out this afternoon and pickup a 410. Been several years and I wish I never sold my last one.

that works.

I started out with a Stevens 20 GA single shot, and share your same memories.

I was loaned a SXS 28 guage once to shoot a round of skeet. I shoulda stole it.

I think shooting my Ithica super single as a kid helped me become a better shot. I still take it out for squirrels. It points very well, for me anyhoo.

I don't think so. My Savage M24 .22/410 has provided me with a number of good meals over the years.

Nah. Just takes practice. I've run 100 straight many times on the skeet field with one, and they are good on small game and birds to about 30 yards. They don't have the pattern density that will allow for sloppy shooting.

I shot a .410 for doves here in Miss for years. Started off as a dare and it worked so well I kept on. Trained bird dogs and killed hundreds of pen birds, pigeons, and a few wild birds with one. Was using a mod42 Win back then. It got away from me and I'm thinking about one of the jap 42's. Anybody had much dealings with one of them?

The .410 is a beginners gun and an experts gun, not for the mediocre. My first shotgun was a Winchester model 37 single shot and I still have it. Up into my 40's it was my bird gun along with an old Stevens 311 .410 SxS that I wish I had kept. Potted MANY a Pheasant, Quail, Dove & Rabbit with those two. I had a 16 Ga mossy at one time but always reached for one of the .410's when I wanted food for the table.

Me thinks it could be fairly useful to stop a carjacking when used in the 3" 00 buck flavor in a Taurus Judge.

When I was a kid, my best friend and next-door-neighbor had an old Stevens SXS 410 with blonde wood, and I thought it was a great little small game getter. No one told me it was hard to hit a squirrel, rabbit, quail, or dove with it. Maybe that's why it helped me take so many full game bags home.

His mom's handyman, an older AA gentleman with 14 kids, raised them all up on the Blue Jays, Thrashers, Wrens, and Robins we piled up for him. Willie Lee had no compunctions about what went in the stew, and it gave us plenty of practice with the BB guns, pellet guns, the 410's and an old A-5 Sweet Sixteen that I still hunt with today.

The .410 barrel on my Contender gets more use than any of the other barrels do now... been thinking about getting a set of brass hulls for it... factory ammo is expensive.. I have never reloaded for that gauge but understand the plastic hulls don't provide as many reloads as larger hulls do.

I wouldn't pick a .410 to teach a kid wing shooting with though. A 28 gauge would be my first choice by far for that. Maybe a 20 if there are light loads available for that... then the only reason would be that 20 gauge ammo is cheaper to shoot.

Likely not, but the 25ACP has got to be a very strong contender for that title.

I wouldnt start a kid on one..but as for being for armchair gunners..just the opposite actually, they are fine in the field..just maybe not for you.

If you want to become an expert shotgunner, start with a 410, once you are good with that, you can shoot any shot gun. In all honesty a 410 is not a beginner shot gun, as it takes much much practice to use one effectively.

Methinks the difference between the .410 and other bores is found not in ballistics but mostly in fit, that being the most significant element of success with a shotgun. Too many .410s are configured for the youth market and poorly choked in my opinion. Properly configured the .410 is as good as most anything afield. From my observations I'd say skeet shooters usually do better with it than the larger bores if for no other reason than reduced recoil.

I recently traded off an Eli Whistler .410 SxS built in the late 1800's. 2-1/2" chambers and very tight chokes at the end of 28" of svelte barrels. Too tight to allow a shotgun rod for cleaning. Back action hammer gun that weighed 4# 3oz and it would consistently powder clays at 25-30 yards using #9 shot. Powder as in "dust". No moss growing on the .410 so far as I can tell, but the ammo is expensive. I have read that .405 Winchester brass can be used for loading, never did try it though.