Shooting with a Busted Shoulder

Relief Sought

As I was soon to learn, with a repaired right shoulder, even light-recoiling pieces became uncomfortable during extended range sessions so I went searching for solutions. There were two significant ones. One was introducing a mechanical device to block that kick, the other was to transition to shooting with my opposite shoulder and hand. The mechanical device solution was easy, while retraining your muscle memory from decades of shooting from the right to left is a rough road. This transition is still a transition-in-progress.

When it comes to recoilless rifle and slug gun shooting on the range, the king is the Caldwell Lead Sled, now offered in four different configurations. The top-of-the-line Lead Sled DFT is a massive, nicely finished shooting rest with a built-in shelf to accept shot or sand bags to increase the weight to over 100 lbs. Even without added weight, the DFT model hits the scales at 24 lbs., is totally adjustable for gun length, sports a dial-adjustable front rest for windage-and-elevation and soaks up recoil like a sponge. In fact, it can “stop” recoil entirely. I only wish I had bought a Lead Sled 10 years ago. It has become the quintessential tool in my post-shoulder replacement kit for shooting sessions.

Before the days of Lead Sleds, we found a variety of ways to reduce recoil that are still highly practical. Adding weight to the gun works. One permanent alternative is to rout out a trough in the forearm and neatly fill it with shot and epoxy. Of course, muzzle brakes and suppressors work to moderate recoil and are increasingly common as manufacturers now routinely offer models with threaded muzzles.

Harnessing the power of inertia to moderate recoil, tubes filled with mercury (C&H Research) or mechanical pistons (Dead Mule) are readily available to insert into buttstocks. There are also recoil-reducing replacement stocks available.

Picked up at a gun show, one of the products I like is a fabric sleeve that wraps around the buttstock of a long gun. Filled with shot or sand, it adds pounds of inertia to the gun. It’s useful on the range, trap or skeet field or from a blind.

The downside to adding weight to a firearm is balance. It’s easy to throw off a firearm’s natural and dynamic balance if it’s being used in a field situation so experiment and go slow.