So, this morning was my firearms class - aside from the early start, it ended up being tons of fun. I got to shoot two different .22 revolvers, a .22 semi-auto handgun, a 12-gauge semi-auto shotgun, a 20-gauge break-action over-under shotgun, a few different kinds of .22 bolt-action rifles, a .22 semi-auto rifle, and a turn-of-the-century.38-40 lever-action Winchester rifle.

A few observations, which may also help various writer-friends reading this (part of the reason I took the class was because I was trying to write a gun-fight on S_F and realized I had no idea what the hell I was talking about):

-Shotguns have a lot of kick, more than I expected - I'm going to have a nice bruise on my shoulder, I think. They're also both the loudest, and hands-down the heaviest of all the types.
-Conversely, rifles have a lot less kick than I had expected, even the .38. The weight varied a lot, with the semi-auto, which was all synthetic being the lightest, and one of the old .22s with a big wood stock being the heaviest.
-The .38, for some reason, was tons of fun to fire.
-The revolvers had less kick than the semi-autos, probably because they were heavier, and didn't have the slide going back. My aim was a lot better with the revolvers, and I think that was why.
-Apparently side-by-side double-barrel shotguns are generally the most expensive type, because the barrels have to be hand-aligned.