In his capable hands, that humpbacked shotgun was pure slaughter on turkeys. It was always a bit of a competition to see who would spit out the first piece of lead shot during a holiday meal. I spent my youth alongside my dad in the Mississippi Delta as he and his Belgium-made Browning Auto-5 kept every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter properly stoked with wild turkey. This mechanism is simple, reliable and rugged.
50-caliber “Ma Deuce” machine gun ever made. A similar mechanism drove countless Model 1919 belt-fed automatic weapons during World War II and every. 50-caliber Barrett M82 anti-materiel rifle is a recoil-operated design. This recoil-driven action can be found on various familiar modern firearms. When properly tweaked, however, the Browning Auto-5 is truly a thing of beauty to see in the field. Too little and there is excess wear and unnecessary recoil. Each combination exerts more or less frictional force against the magazine tube during the firing cycle. The overall effect is elegant.Ī quirky aspect of this recoil-operated design is that various bushings must be properly configured to manage various types of loads. The spring for the barrel is in the forearm. The bolt subsequently strips a fresh round from the mag before closing with the barrel to lock the shell in battery. The recoil spring then shoves the barrel forward as the empty shell is ejected. This component cycles backward more than the length of the shell. That means the barrel and bolt assembly recoil rearward as one unit upon firing. The subsequent rich relationship between FN and Browning produced the P35 Hi-Power pistol, the action of which drives almost every combat handgun today. In frustration, Browning approached Fabrique Nationale in Belgium. In a darkly unexpected turn of events, Remington’s president died of a heart attack in the midst of negotiations. He subsequently offered his design to Remington. Browning attempted to sell his Auto-5 design to Winchester, only to have company officials balk at his terms. The developmental history of the Auto-5 reads like a soap opera. Of his 128 patented designs, Browning described theAuto-5 as his “best achievement.” The Auto-5 was the second-most produced autoloading shotgun in history, just behind the Remington Model 1100. Svelte, trim and elegant, the Auto-5 remained in continuous production until 1998, two years shy of a century. The Auto-5 hit the commercial market in 1900 as the world’s first successful autoloading shotgun. In addition to a broad array of handguns and semi-automatic rifles like the Winchester Model 1907, Prohibition-era gangsters frequently used state-of-the-art shotguns.įirearms luminary John Moses Browning designed his definitive Auto-5 shotgun in 1898. However, these machine guns were expensive and relatively difficult to obtain.
The Thompson submachine gun and, to a lesser extent, the Browning Automatic Rifle got all of the press. In more contemporary terms, these men were closer to terrorists. The fact that they stole money and slaughtered innocents in the process is frequently glossed over in historical tomes. Those ne’er-do-wells brazen enough to embrace this life captured a struggling nation’s imagination and, for some, attained folk hero status. The popular term of the day was “motorized bandit.” The advent of the powerful V8 engine made automobiles fast enough to whisk a bank-robbing crew in and out of a town before authorities could mount an effective response. As the United States redefined itself in light of these technological developments, some unsavory characters rode the crest of this revolution to infamy. The nation was clawing its way out of the Great Depression while advances in industrial technology brought us heady stuff like automobiles, radios, telephones and electric lights. The 1920s and 1930s represented a seminal period in American history.
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