Funny how felt recoil is relative. When I introduce a person to guns, and actually shooting them, I always start out with a 22 pistol. And I make absolutely sure they are wearing proper ear and eye protection first! Then I start with an old Ruger Standard model. After they are comfortable shooting that, I step up to some plinking 38 special or light loaded 9mm loads. And then they seem to enjoy those rounds, I ask them it they want to move up to heavier recoil type guns. If so, then I switch to hotter loads from each of those type guns. Seem after a while, they are liking the recoil and want to move up even further. Then out comes hunting 357 mag loads. Usually that is their stopping point. And that is okay too. Then we drop back to 22's and it is like a cap gun to them in comparison. But they also seem to make a decision on what they like and start talking about buying a gun for themselves.
So many people try to impress a potential gun shooter/owner with heavy loaded 357 mag and/or 44 mag, from the get go and literally scare off a potential gun owner. Not the proper way it should be, in my opinion. JMHO!
True story. I once had a reputation of being able to shoot extremely accurate and could easily ignore recoil. So every hunting season that trolled around I was asked if I could zero in a lot of people's hunting rifles and scopes for them.
One time I had to zero 13 rifles at the range at one setting. As it was getting dark, they arranged their vehicles so their headlight shined on the down range targets. And I ALWAYS used bench rest stands and sand bags. After I zeroed the rifles in, the owners would always ask if they could shoot their rifle to see if they could hit the target. I would say, of course, it is your rifle after all.
Well one guy bought a new 7mm mag. with a nice variable Leapold scope on top. It was the latest craze at that time and seems like everyone just had to have a 7mm Magnum for the season. So I took the typical 3 to 5 rounds and was hitting target center before the third round. So the owner ask to shoot the rifle. He couldn't even hit the paper. And said it wasn't zeroed. So I took three more rounds, and target center and nice grouping. So he shot his rifle again and didn't hit the paper again.
I watched him shoot, and he was so scared of that 7mm mag recoil, he literally turned his head and closed his eyes as he pull the trigger... We all started laughing because he bought more gun then he could shoot because of the heavy recoil. But he had to have one from peer pressure.
