Is it the weight or the auto load that reduced the kick. It's been one heck of a long time since I shot both a Garand and a Springfield.
I felt like the Springfield would eventually turn my shoulder into hamburger. Not so much with the Garand
Weight can help, but its more about how you shoulder and hold the rifle than anything else. The rifle can only "kick" you, if you let it.
Another issue in this respect is shooting off a bench vs shooting from field positions. Shooting from a bench doesn't allow you to become "one with the rifle" and you tend to get beat up because of it.
Shooting from field positions is a lot more comfortable and you react with the rifle as one and move with things, instead of being the "recoil stop".
I think a lot of things changed as we moved through the 60's and 70's, both in how people were taught to shoot and how the guns themselves are built.
If you learn to properly shoulder the rifle, life is usually a lot more pleasant, and you can normally shoot all day in a tee shirt, and that's with a rifle with a steel butt plate.
Rifles in the past were built with low mounted iron sights and stocks meant to shoot with them and a shorter LOP, with a steel butt plate, meant more for field work than bench or rest type shooting. Getting a scope on one was a bit more of a chore and often required a gunsmith. The rifles usually shouldered quickly and naturally too, something I don't see a lot of anymore, at least for me anyway.
Most of today's rifles are set up just the opposite, meant first and foremost to have a scope or some other optic (fairly easily) mounted, with a high comb stock that requires irons, if they even have them, to sit higher on the gun as well. They usually come with a recoil pad too, which just makes the LOP all wrong for natural, field type shooting, but helps with the bench and the "kick" issues associated with it.
Im starting to think this is becoming one of those generational things and as time goes on, things get lost and forgotten.
Ive seen couple of videos recently that blatantly show how old we (or some of us anyway
) are getting. One was a guy what looked to be late teens, early 20's, whos mom was trying to show him how to use a rotary wall phone. He was completely lost, and I couldn't believe he was really that dumb, but he was doing a great job at doing that.
The other was a kid in his later teens that was handed a cassette tape and they had no idea as to what it was, was having great difficulty just getting it out of the case, and when told it was "music", he put it up to their ear and tried to listen. Damn Im old!
And its the same sort of thing you see when you hand younger people a stripper with 06 in it and tell them to load the 03. As Commander Cody used to say.....Lost in the Ozone!
ETA: It just glanced on me, I had Lost in the Ozone on LP, 8 track, cassette, CD, and now download. Damn Im old!
