Heavy guns are for bench rests, tree stands, and sherpas, not for upland hunters.

Franchi knows this and purpose-built their six-pound 20-gauge Affinity 3 Elite Upland to give all-day mobile bird hunters a firearm that works well, points better than some dogs, and doesn't beat the snot out of your shoulder.

Aside from endurance, there's a far more sporting reason to have or want an ultralight upland gun – they're faster. It's a lot faster.

Over the past upland season, my trusty bird dog, Allie Bama, and I took Franchi's firearm all over Virginia, chasing pheasants, quail, chukar, and the ordinary but tough-to-eat sporting clay. Not Allie nor Franchi ever let me down. I doubt either would say the same of me, but that's another story.

My first impression of the Affinity 3 Elite Upland was how thin and balanced it was. I'll never get mistaken for Bigfoot at a meager 5'6" height, so smaller firearms always work better for me. By smaller, I don't just mean shorter length of pull, either. How broad a gun is matters just as much, if not more, when handling. That's part of the allure of lever-action rifles – they're thinner and more accessible to carry because of it. The Affinity 3 Elite Upland is 48 inches long, thanks to a 26-inch barrel in the 20-gauge.

My first impression was the Elite Upland's balance, and my second was its uptown girl look. (A head nod to Billy Joel.) It's a pretty gun and a rare one in the upland market, with its GunMetal Gray Cerekote matched to A-Grade Satin Walnut furniture.

Still, the only thing a shotgun with good looks gets you is style. They hit or miss just as much as ugly guns, and missing with the Franchi might be worse because people tend to keep their eyes on the good-looking (guns) ones, so missing with one won't be a secret.

The shotgun handles 2 ¾ and 3-inch 20-gauge shells and comes with close, mid-range, and long-range ported choke tubes. The upland-specific chokes are super-easy to change out in the field when you need an excuse for missing birds – I mean to adjust the shotgun to the proper expected engagement distances for the birds you plan to hunt based on the field conditions and ammunition used. I mainly shot Federal Prairie Upland, but the Franchi had an easy taste palate to appease, with Fiocchi and Winchester loads cycling just fine. I shot (at) a lot more sporting clays than I did anything else, so I used a lot of different kinds of ammunition. I never had any failures to feed, fire, or eject, and that included 2 ¾ inch as well as full-powered 3-inch loads.

To be fair to Franchi and myself, the loaner gun was quite long on me. The standard length of pull for this shotgun is 14-3/8 inches. My preferred length of pull is 12 inches. If I owned this gun, I'd get it sized to fit me, and the gun would have reviewed better because it would have been faster, and I probably would have shot better. But that's a testimony to proper gun fit, which is obtainable with this gun (and most shotguns), not to its overall quality and functionality. Note that the Franchi comes with the Omni Stock adjustable fitting system, which allows you to adjust drop and cast. Doing either would have helped me a little, but LOP issues are complex. That's no knock on Franchi.

Some other engineering elegances of this shotgun include Franchi's well-established Inertia-Driven action, unique forcing cone design for more consistent patterning, recoil mitigation, and faster follow-up shots, Truglo Dual-Color Fiber Optic sights, oversized and textured bolt controls (so you can find them and use them with our without gloves), a removable trigger group assembly for easier cleaning, a beveled loading port which makes a lot more of a difference than I thought after extended use, and a very effective but proprietary TSA recoil pad (by proprietary I mean if I sized this shotgun to fit me, I'd lose this pad and have to use an aftermarket pad. Is this good? That's a personal thing, but it's a point worth making).

The folks at Franchi know upland hunting, which shows in their shotgun. The Affinity 3 Upland Elite is a gorgeous, reliable, upland-minded shotgun that will please anyone focused on killing birds in style. It will cost you $1349 MSRP.

– Jay Pinsky, Editor, The Hunting Wire