Jimmy S posted a worthwhile article to read. Follow it as closely as possible. There's many ways and methods people use to introduce the gun but the method Jimmy S posted works and should be used. You can adapt the method for birddogs but here are some reasons why I don't suggest other methods:

1. Banging pots on a pup while eating will sometime make a pup more skittish. If the pup is skittish (you yell at it alot or alot of loud noises around you), banging pots may put it over the edge. Plus, you can use feeding time for more beneficial conditioning like a whistle for recall or what I did, steady the dog to woah before eating.

2. Never take an unexposed dog to a gunrange unless you can snap your fingers and magically appear 20 miles away in an instant. Or you can plead your case to other shooters to stop shooting just enough time to get out of hearing range of your dog. Because if your dog shows any tendancy of developing gunshyness, you can't get away fast enough. The worst is when there's a high powered rifle range nearby. High powered calibers are 'supersonic' range, ie. faster than sound. It builds a doppler effect which can hurt a dog's hearing. That's why a rifle sounds different and hurts your ears when shooting as opposed to a shotgun.

3. Never shoot more than one gun at a time. Even if you've accustomed the dog to gunfire. Lets say you've gone over the hump and able to shoot 12 ga. shells over him. Use several sessions or one season with just one gun. Then slowly add another gun for the next season if you wish but don't barrage the dog with 4-5 automatic guns all firing at one bird. Most likely, your dog will digress.

Alot of this is for birddogs as I only know one way to properly introduce gunfire and that's using birds. How well does it work? After introduction at nine months, I took my dog out to the hunting field (no gun). A sound of a gunshot pulled my dog's attention - tail went high, ears perked up and she ran towards it. She knew someone had found a bird. To this day at 3 yrs old, she gets excited at balloons. She will pounceto burst them then excitedly search upwards to look for the bird.

I've triedthe gunrangeand the.22 blanks to 20ga/12ga (faraway)but the best method so far is using birds (or whatever excites the dog) to introducegunfire. No waiting for the dogtofigure out that shots are good and no hoping the dog can handle the gunrange (btw, the dog was thickheaded enough for me to try it).