The gun mount is the way you get your shotgun’s barrels underneath your shooting eye as directly and efficiently as possible. It’s as simple as that.

But if you look at me, or many other of the world’s top shots, you’ll see that the way we go about it is far from simple. Some of us including myself press our heads into the stock – we want a firm connection between our cheek and the wood. Others have only light cheek pressure, and a few don’t have their gun anywhere near the stock.

You’ve got shots who stand straight up, and others who hunch forward, almost to the point where it’s a problem. I’ve got my own quirks, and despite all of my successes, my form is less than classic.

In the end, form is great, but execution matters. For proof, I point to the professional golfer Jim Furyk, who has an absolutely hideous swing – one broadcaster said he looks like an octopus falling out of a tree. Yet when his club head comes around and meets the ball, he’s perfect. That’s why he’s had such a brilliant career.

For me, a good gun mount starts by making sure your shoulders are level. If one’s higher or lower than the other, then your body rotation and swing is going to be erratic and out of sync.

Look at other sports like tennis that involve a similar swing technique: If your shoulders aren’t level or parallel with each other, you can’t hit the ball on a nice level plane. If you’re leaning back, with your racket shoulder lower than the other, the ball’s going fly up in the air whether you want it to or not.

I want my feet basically shoulder-width apart. If your feet are outside your shoulders, your stance is too wide and you can’t rotate your body properly. If your stance is too narrow, you feel as if you’re going to fall over. Get your feet underneath your shoulders, and everything else will follow.

Then I want to get my head on the stock. Although plenty of people have had success without firm cheek pressure, I want to have it. I think it gives me an advantage in consistency. Sometimes I see a shooter who uses less cheek pressure start to tighten up towards the end of a tournament, or a good round. They start putting their head on the stock, trying to be more precise.

Tension doesn’t help anyone perform. Nor does adrenaline, or trying to be perfect. What’s more, by scrunching down into the stock the shooter puts his eye in a different place, creating a different sight picture that sends his shot two or three yards off target. He tries harder, burying his head on the wood … the result isn’t pretty.

On the other hand, since I always use firm cheek pressure, I’m not going to vary if I feel a spot of nerves. My eye is always in the same spot behind the barrel, whether I’m shooting a local competition on a Saturday morning or in a shoot-off for a world championship.

That’s also why I have a parallel comb on my Perazzi. I’m a big believer that you should have the same view down the barrel no matter where your cheek strikes the comb. A parallel stock help for that.

If you’ve got a typical sporting stock with a bit of drop in the comb and your cheek is further back than normal, your eye is going to be lower than ideal. If you crawl forward on the stock, it’s going to be higher than you’re used to. Either way, your point of impact may vary as a result.

If you watch me shoot, you may notice that I have a tendency to use my back hand more than most people when I’m bringing the gun to my face. Most coaches would call it a flaw, but there’s not a lot that I can do about it. I’ve even come to consider it a bit of an advantage.
As many people know, I was a butcher before I became a fulltime professional shooter. In 1986, I was cutting some semi-frozen meat and my knife slipped, slashing the back of my left hand and wrist, and severing all its tendons.

I had the tendons repaired, but my left hand was completely useless for 16 weeks. I shot one-handed, using my left hand mostly as a rest, but I lost all my muscle in that forearm. Even today, my right forearm is significantly larger than the left.

Ultimately, I feel this locks me into the gun and helps me rotate my body more efficiently. My right hand’s doing the work and my left is pretty much along for the ride. My muzzle dips a bit at the start of my move, but once my mount is complete, I’m like Jim Furyk – in perfect position to deliver the shot.

I wind up standing relatively upright, with my head erect, my eyes level, and my shoulders parallel, on the same plane with each other. I think this helps me see the target better, and it’s a key part of learning how to shoot.

Again, I’ll point back to tennis. Roger Federer and some of the other greats never seem as if they’re rushing to return a serve – you’d think they had all the time in the world. I believe that those athletes generate that extra time through their eyesight. They have trained themselves to use their eyes at a very high level of efficiency.

They might be bent over when they’re getting ready to return service, but when it comes time to strike the ball, they stand erect with their head dead still and upright over their racket. I’ve noticed that the best hitters in American baseball do much the same thing: Their heads are upright and still, and their eyes are level when they swing.

Keeping your head in that position helps you rotate your body just like a tennis player or baseball batter. That’s where power is generated, and it’s the most efficient way to move.

Like everything else, you learn to mount the gun through practice. One of the drills that I use and recommend involves a mirror. Stand about five yards from the mirror and walk up to it until your nose touches the mirror. That will put a little condensation spot on the glass.

Take a black felt-tip pen and make a little circle on that spot. Then walk back and practice mounting your gun on that black spot. Keep your head still and bring the gun up to your face. If you’re right in the middle of that black dot, that’s perfect. If you’re not in the dot consistently, you’ll know it. If you can get your mount consistently on the dot, your scores will jump immediately.

In the end, I think my way of mounting a gun provides a little bit of leeway, particularly for those of us who don’t have textbook form. I’m not concerned about perfect form so much as I am having my shoulders level and parallel, my balance being solid, and my head upright with firm cheek pressure on the stock. Partially that’s because I’m a swing-through shooter, which I find more forgiving than many other methods.

Some of those methods require a near-perfect mount as it’s an essential part of the necessary timing and syncing up with the target. They need much more precision in establishing their insertion point relative to the target, whereas I know I’m starting somewhere behind the bird and moving through it to establish the proper lead.

As I’ve said before, one of the reasons why I prefer swing-through is because it always gives me the line of the target, and there’s little chance that I will shoot high or low. To my mind, that gives me a 50 percent advantage as I’m only going to miss the target in front or behind.

At the same time, I don’t have to be perfectly smooth. My gun is in my face and moving through the bird to establish my lead. The “flaw” in my mount hasn’t gone away, but it’s in the past and irrelevant to what I’m doing to engage the target. At that point, when I’m swinging on the target, I am as smooth as possible – and my mount and set up helps me do that.

Most of us don’t have a perfect gun mount, myself included. You could nit-pick flaws in almost every case. But the very best shooters are consistent in their mount, using it to get the gun in the right place beneath their shooting eye, and that makes them consistent when they pull the trigger. Work to clean up your mount and make it as smooth as possible, but above all, make it consistent.