HOW TOM... j By Bob Nichols Shooting Editor, Field and Stream ' ONE of the commonest errors of the novice upland hunter is to try to shoot a gun that is too long In the barrel. There is a widespread belief that long barrels make a gun shoot harder. Practically speaking, this isn't true. The short-barrel gun shoots just as hard, and kills game Just as far away, as the old-fashioned "Long-Tom." The gun with 32, or even 30-inch barrels, is too long. Vou will do better work with 28 better still with 26-inch barrels. I am even of the opinion that most standard gunstocks are slightly too long. The standard stock is about 14 inches from front of trigger to the middle of the butt-plate. My favorite fa-vorite gun has 26-inch barrel and 1314-inch stock. The shortened gun at the barrel as well as at the stock speeds up your handling of It tremendously. In the latest designs of American shotguns being turned out today, one trend is definitely toward the 26-inch barrel. This is undoubtedly undoubted-ly the gun for upland use. Robert Churchill, the famous English gun maker, was the pioneer in this field of shotgun research. Some years ago he brought out his new well-known well-known line XXV guns, so named because of their 25-lnch barrels and almost immediately It became apparent that the users of these short-barrel guns were to do better bet-ter work in the field than sportsmen sports-men of equal skill using longer tubes. The reason Is easy to demonstrate. dem-onstrate. The shorter yon make your "pointer," the quicker you can point it Try pointing with a walking walk-ing stick. Much quicker. Try pointing point-ing with your finger Instantaneous. If you want to learn to shoot, and learn it quickly, begin now with a short-barreled, lightweight 20-gauge. 20-gauge. Have It properly stocked to fit you. Then watch your scoring scor-ing begin to climb! Just within the last year I have had a fine opportunity to observe how the right gun can make a wonderful won-derful difference in speeding up a man's acquisition of skill. I have a friend who has been hunting for the past ten years. Up until last summer, even with all his experience, experi-ence, he was still a miserable shot Shortly after I met him early last spring he told me, jokingly and regretfully, re-gretfully, that the only reason his friends ever took him on a hunt was because he has big feet and had the reputation for kicking up more game than any other shooter in the party. He finally showed me his gun. It was all I expected it would be. A 12-gauge with 30-inch barrels that tipped the scales at exactly seven and three-quarters pounds. Moreover, More-over, It was bored modified and full choke much too close for a field gun. As a crowning fault It had a good 3 inches of drop at the heel of the buttstock in other words, an "undershooting" gun. The big drop explained why he could kill an occasional oc-casional rabbit, for the right way to shoot rabbits Is to slightly undershoot under-shoot But pheasant, woodcock, or grouse, were too much for him. He had arrived at the hopeless stage where he was convinced that he could never become a decent shot Shortly after that he did me a kind favor. In return I presented him with an extra gun I had In my cabinet a neat little 20-gauge pump gun, with 26-lnch modified choke barrel, that weighed just short of six pounds. He was grateful, but just a little dubious about so small a gun. During the remainder of the summer sum-mer and on up through September, I took him crow and hawk shooting frequently. Slowly I taught him that he had to swing from behind his target swing past and shoot ahead of it Before long he was tumbling the cornstealers and chick-en-snatchers from SO to 40 yards out of the sky with fair regularity and was he delighted! Lately, during the hunting season, sea-son, he shot with the same friends who formerly regarded him as the "game dog" of the party. Only this time the laugh was on them. He killed grouse, pheasant, woodcock and taking bunnies, he told me later, was like shooting fish in a bathtub. On two occasions he out-shot out-shot every man in the party. Anyone can learn to shoot If he gets the RIGHT gun! , Western Newspaper Union.