I’m not a fan of Brownings for a number of reasons, their hype doesn’t live up to reality.
In the modern era, my objections are low quality. Sure they have pretty wood, but inside those A-bolts is a plastic (nylon) trigger. Polyurethane finish over pretty wood means they don’t age very well. I have higher standards. Also in the modern era, soulless. The best ones seem to be made by Miroku in Japan. I don’t pay premium money for Japanese firearms and inversely, it’s a solid insult that the best ones of the modern era were Japanese. Then there is the irrelevance of brand, is it a Winchester or a Browning? Whatever a trademark attorney decides to authorize.
In the older era, they rushed quality and a pile of them were the “salt wood” guns. Nice, they rusted out thousands of guns by rushing production and using caustic salts to suck the moisture out of wood so they good rush them to the market.
Then it’s on to the marketing. Decals and tattoos, coolers and BBQ grills, whatever nonsense item made in China you can dream up can have that silly logo slapped on it.
Then of course there’s the Browning collector mentality that I abhor. It’s the #1 most collected mint-never-used-still-in-box gun ever. There are more never handled still in boxes than there are used ones in gun racks. There is a soulless American collector mentality that goes with them that is sad, accumulating depreciating assets that they cannot even handle for fear they’ll go down in value further. (Adjusted for inflation)
I’ll leave you with the last point: Nobody in history has ever been to the “Browning” Factory because its never existed. It’s just a label slapped on a variety of guns from Belgium, Virginia, Montana, Japan, and god knows where else.
Unrelated to all the above: John Moses Browning was a brilliant engineer and inventor and created a number of interesting designs for a number of different manufacturers.
