Grew up deer hunting in a shotgun/bow only county. At 9, dad had me shooting a youth 20ga single with of course 3in 00 magnums. Plastic buttplate. That thing was brutal.
Pattern must have sucked, I was 9, had a doe and yearling start feeding under a crabapple tree at about 25/30 yards. Killed them both one shot. Deer career has been downhill ever since.
Good story! 00 buck is not a handicap under the right conditions. It's deadly on deer. I grew up hunting shotgun-only counties and we just accepted 00 was what it was and your deer had to be 40 yards or closer. In our jungles, that's not that hard. Most were that close and closer. I mainly use slugs now, but I still use 00 for deer. I call it my weekend load. Because I know on Fridays and Saturdays, the hunt clubs will be out running their hounds and many of the deer on those days are moving fast not paying terrible attention to what they are running towards, only what they are running from. I've had deer run by so close I could almost reach out and touch them. In thick cover, under those circumstances, 00 is the best deer round there is.
Slugs werent allowed in our county. When the 3 1/2in craze hit, dad went and bought two mossberg 835s, we stacked deer up with those things. I remember he belly crawled up to a foodplot on a big 10 eating one morning, squeeze one off at 67 steps. He didn't go far. Biggest thing though with that 00, if they didn't drop, you needed to watch them fall. That buckshot would plug a hole and rarely got any blood trail.
The guy that developed hevishot lives right down the road from me, he'd bring us cases of free stuff in the early days. I actually have a box of some of his prototype hevi buckshot from 20 years ago or so he gave me to test out.
