Note: Originally published November 1, 2016.
I just flew in from South Dakota, and I guess that I should have sent this in from the road. I didn’t because I was too busy shooting pheasants at R&R Pheasant Hunting in Seneca, South Dakota. A man has to have a sense of priorities, and in my personal view of life, very few things rank above pheasant hunting. I was out there at a little confab sponsored by the Browning/Winchester folks. Their idea was to lure a bunch of gun scribes out there and introduce a slew of new products.
They did, too. And a bunch of good ones, at that. There was one, however, that stood out from the crowd, and I just want to let you know about a very special gun that’s coming to a sporting goods store near you in the immediate future.
At the time I left home, I was planning to do a little piece extolling the virtues of the 16 gauge and urging all of you who haven’t tried one to do so. As usual, I ran out of time and had to postpone it until my return. What I didn’t know was that one of Browning’s new products was a new “Sweet Sixteen” autoloader.
Why the quotation marks? Because it’s an entirely new gun, rather than a clone of the old one. I loved the old one, and don’t want to denigrate it in any way, but the new one’s even better! It has an alloy receiver, a short-recoil action, and when fitted with a 28-inch barrel, weighs only 5 pounds, 13 ounces. And I think it may be the most well-balanced self-shucker ever made.
As you would expect at that weight, it’s lightning quick. The big news is that it’s so well balanced that it doesn’t tend to over-swing or stop short. It just comes up really quickly and swings smoothly through the target. And if you know shotguns, you know that’s nearly miraculous for a gun of such scant weight.
The new Sweet Sixteen should be on dealer’s shelves in a couple of months or a little more, so you can go see for yourself. Most of the writers in attendance ordered one, and I’d bet a pretty penny that most of our readers will fall in love with it just like we did.
I’ll talk at greater length about the wonderful little gun in my January/February column. Not a subscriber? Sign up now!
