Trap shooting, or trapshooting in North America, is one of the three major disciplines of competitive clay pigeon shooting, which is shooting shotguns at clay targets. The other disciplines are skeet shooting and sporting clays.

A shotgun is a long-barreled firearm designed to shoot a straight-walled cartridge known as a shotshell, which discharges numerous small spherical projectiles called shot, or a single solid projectile called a slug. Shotguns are most commonly used as smoothbore firearms, meaning that their gun barrels have no rifling on the inner wall, but rifled barrels for shooting sabot slugs are also available.