I've been considering a Mossberg 500 or 590 as my next firearms purchase, but so far the only shotgun I've fired has had a Knoxx recoil-reducing stock on it and was loaded with low-recoil buckshot. I thought it'd be prudent to try out a shotgun with a regular stock and full-snot ammunition before I committed to that decision. So I went out to the range today and rented a their Remington 870 with a standard synthetic stock. Bought a 25-shell box of Remington LE 00-buckshot, standard 2.75" 9-pellet load, not low recoil, but not a 3" Magnum or anything extreme like that.
Set up my lane, loaded up the shotgun, braced the stock hard against my shoulder, and fired.
It hurt. A lot.
Not "that’s gonna leave a mark” pain, or “you’re gonna feel that in the morning” pain, but the kind of exquisite, agonizing pain that makes you stop what you are doing, step back, and say to yourself “I need to seriously re-evaluate my life choices.” Not the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life (that would be my appendicitis), but pretty darn bad nonetheless.
Unfortunately, I’m both stubborn and cheap (I paid $25 for this box of ammo, and I’m gonna get my money’s worth, dammit!) so I kept plugging away. By the time I was down to the last six shells, my shoulder was hurting so bad that even shouldering the shotgun was markedly unpleasant. So I switched shoulders, opting to the shoot the shotgun left-handed instead of right-handed. It hurt, sure, but on a “that’s gonna bruise” level rather than the “bad life choice” agony my right shoulder was experiencing. Nowhere near as bad. Forget same ballpark, it’s not even in the same city.
Unfortunately, this only confirms something I’ve suspected for quite some time. My right shoulder has been bothering me for a number of years now. It’ll start aching after only a relatively-moderate amount of physical activity: arrying a somewhat-heavy backpack, paddling a canoe or rowboat, lifting weights, etc. all aggravate it, and sometimes it just starts hurting for no reason. I suspect that I injured it somehow at some point in my not-so-distant youth, but being the stubborn fool I can be sometimes, I never bothered getting it checked out.
That ends now. Or, at least, it’ll end pretty soon. My benefits from work kicked in recently, so I’ll be making a doctor’s appointment for my day off next week. I gotta get this figured out, and I gotta get it fixed. But until then, I’m off long guns, or at least anything with more oomph than a .22LR.
