Guns For Girls

A new generation of serious lady shots has prompted gunmakers to build guns specifically for women. We explore the range and what our top female shots are using now

- 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.

THE NEW RECRUITS

Well, those boy-type creatures are women and they now make up a substantial proportion of the shooting community worldwide. The latest Home Office figures show that 32,412 women have a shotgun certificate and, of course, many more shoot regularly without owning their own gun. The main organisation for both clay and game shooters, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), expects to recruit its 10,000th female member this year. BASC chairman Peter Glenser is delighted by the boom in women’s shooting, saying: “We are in a golden age of shooting and I am heartened to see so many new people, especially women, picking up a gun for the first time.”