Seated shooting

If you are confined to a wheelchair, what difference does gunfit, length and weight have on your shooting? Richard Faulks finds out

- Richard Faulks

Jean-Paul Gaudin has featured in an article I wrote about the work he’s doing advising game shoots and shooting grounds on how to make our sport open and inclusive for wheelchair users. He also has a YouTube channel called The Seated Gun that features his exploits in the field.

Dan Parker has been featured on the cover of the magazine. They are both self-motivated tenacious characters. Both have had unfortunate spinal injuries and now shoot game, pigeons and clays from a seated position. JP has been shooting seated for the past 10 years and Dan for the past 18 months. We thought they could swap ideas and techniques that may help each other.

Dan has a T4 complete injury and JP’s is now a level L1 incomplete. Simply put, JP has more use of his lower body than Dan. Dan has adopted a single-handed shooting style as he feels he needs his left hand to balance himself while taking the shot. JP still has some sensation and movement in his lower limbs but, most importantly here, he has more upper body movement and strength due to having all his core muscles.

This enables JP to move further and keep his balance better when shooting, which is something that Dan struggles with. Dan had simply shot one-handed following his accident as he didn’t think he could shoot two-handed because of his balance. JP became convinced, that with some advice, guidance and confidence building, Dan would be able to shoot double-handed if his positioning to the targets was incorporated into his shooting. This would enable him to get on to the targets better too.