now empty, shell casing, and ramming a new round into the chamber for a second shot. One sees semi-automatics in tournaments, occasionally, now. They shoot well when clean, but are prone to jamming when dirty, when fouled by debris, or when there is something unusual about the rounds in gun. Just how prone to jamming varies by brand, design and shooter maintenance. They largely supplanted pump guns in skeet tournaments during the 1960s, because, even if they jam from time to time, semi-automatics still invite less error than all the activity the shooter must control with a pump gun. Further, semi-automatics usually offer a softer recoil, a real benefit given all the rounds fired in a skeet tournament. Semi-automatics are most reliable with 12 ga. rounds, and are thus most used in the 12 ga. skeet events. A double-barreled shotgun is just that: two single shot barrels and hammer sets attached to the same receiver and trigger assembly. The barrels are attached to each other and are aimed to hit the same spot a given distance: say, 21 yards or so at skeet (though the shot pattern from both barrels will still be very close both before and after that yardage, because the barrels are very close together). The barrel set hinges on the bottom of the gun's receiver and is locked in place by lever on top of the action. When the lever is pushed, it releases the barrels, allowing them to swing down from the hinge, exposing the chambers for each barrel. The shooter drops one round into each chamber and then swings the barrels back up, closing and locking the breech. The act of opening and closing the gun cocks both hammers, each of which are activated, in a modern gun, by a single trigger: once the action is closed, the gun will fire two shots as fast as a person can pull the trigger twice. A two barrel gun can have the two barrels side by side or one on top of the other (stacked). All serious skeet tournament two barrel guns are stacked (the narrow sighting picture is an advantage), and are most commonly referred to as "over and under" shotguns. Two barrel guns are the least fussy about ammunition and surest method of getting two fast shots from a shotgun. These guns also permit the shooter to recover every just-fired shotgun shell, to be