Gun for my wife

I had a similar experience trying to find a gun for my girlfriend. She is just a smidgen over 5' tall, and has proportionately short arms. Most of the your models we found had a 13.5" LOP, judging by the specs. She handled a few and rather like the Browning Gold Fusion Micro, although most "youth" models were still to long in the LOP. She also has very small hands, and the forestock on the Browning was pretty large for her to handle. We looked at the Benelli Montefeltro Short Stock in 20 ga on the Internet. She liked it, the LOP is published at 12.5", and the forestock is very thin. Unfortunately, she was unable to handle one, as they are pretty scarce. We took a chance and got one over the Internet. It fits here like a glove. She is very happy with it. She had some initial bruising (see other post) but that was due to a loose mount. She has since tightened her mount and the bruising is a thing of the past. She should be outshooting me in about a month ...

Ctrout

Have your wife try a few guns, a 20 MAY not be the answer, they are lighter for sure, but can kick more.

Get her to work with someone who can correctly check her dominace, set up her stance, and offer several guns of different weights and caliber. Then she will know what she wants. Note SHE should make the choice

Too many males damage their female partner's desire to shoot by giving them an inapproprate gun.

The worst case I had was a man who gave his 4' 11" 85 lb wife a 12 ***** Wingmaster - I swear he did not want her to shoot.

Roger

First, get her to shoot some of the guns she might be interested in owning. We went to a ladies day at our local club and the lovely Mrs. shot an 1100 LW-20 with a 28" barrel and she liked it quite a bit.
We started shopping the next day and within a couple weeks we found an LT 1100 Special Field in 20 ga for close to 300 clams.
My bride is a perfect 5'3" and this gun fits her like it was made especially for her. The LT 1100 is very light and has a short 21" barrel and English (straight) stock. She is delighted with the LT 1100 Special Field and we shoot almost every week.
In fact, I liked her 20 ga so much I bought an 1100 12 and put a short twin-bead barrel and English stock on it so I could have my own "Special".
The single most important factor is that she must choose the gun that she likes. The odds just aren't in your favor if you use logic to determine what is "best" and buy it for her.
Mike

Pigeon??? Are you my wife??? Sure sound like her... 5'4", hunts and target shoots? AND has a Ladies Gold?

In all seriousness, I've been on a quest for a woman's gun as well. My wife shoots a 12 gage Citori Sporting Clays model and she can hit pretty well with it, but the recoil and barrel weight always stopped her from shooting a second set of clays. Sometimes she's taken the Citori pheasant hunting but has come to prefer my Franchi 20 gage o/u or her 20 gage 870 skeet barrel.

All things considered I wanted to to get her a 'light' 12 gage, which seemed like an oxymoron. Then I started shooting an Baretta Extrema in place of my Citori Hunting (aka "the Duck Buster") and fell in love with the auto. Couple this with accidentally DROPPING her Citori and cracking the front stock and dinging ip the barrel and I figured it might be a nice time to find her a new gun. After much trouble I FINALLY located a Ladies Gold and traded in my Citori. I got her a few Midas chokes, some other 'cool toys' and off we went to the range...

The comb seems still too high after using the standard shims, but she is hitting with the thing. I was kind of surprised, but non of the shims seem to have any cast in them either. In any event, before I try and alter the shims further, she's going to shoot it as is for a bit.

The gun was late coming in, so she wasn't able to do any practice with the gun before hitting the clays course. She shot a 25 on both the white and green courses at our local clay place. It's been a million years since she's been able to shoot two rounds due to recoil. The next day we burned 200 birds at the local rifle range and at the end she was zeroing ok, smoking stuff with a modified at 30 yards. She started to smile... then I started to smile... (and plan to "quietly" take her Citori in to repair my boo-boo).

The other thing I was impressed with was that the gun only had about 4 feed jams in 300+ rounds so far. I thought there would be more until the gun got 'broken in', but it apprears to be going ok. I think all but one of the jams were in the first 100 rounds.

So in short, for us anyways, the Ladies Gold was a good choice. It apprears to be quite a bit more than a reduced stock "kiddie gun". A lot more thought went into it, the fore grip is narrower, the pull is like 13.5, the comb is higher, the pistol grip narrower and more radiused I think. All I know is that the gun doesn't fit me worth a c##p, but it fits her ok