How To Write Special Feature Articles, page 99 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
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career:
Browning comes from an old-stock Mormon family of Ogden, Utah. As a young man he was a great hunter, going off into the woods for a month or six weeks at a time, with only his gun for company. He was only 24 when he worked out his ideas for a gun carrying a magazine full of cartridges, which could be fired rapidly in succession. He pounded out the parts for his first rapid-fire gun with hammer and cold chisel.
Since that time, pump and "trombone" shotguns, automatic pistols, rapid-fire rifles produced by the biggest firearms manufacturers in the country have been Browning's products.
The United States army pistol is a Browning invention.
A Browning pistol manufactured by the Fabrique Nationale of Belgium was made the standard equipment for the armies of Belgium, Russia, Spain, Italy and Serbia.
On completion of the one-millionth pistol by the Fabrique Nationale, King Albert of Belgium knighted the modest inventor, so he is now, officially, "Sir" John Browning.
Browning is tall, slender, slightly stooped, 62, bald except for a rim of gray hair, and wears a closely clipped gray moustache. His face is marked by a network of fine lines.
Although Browning will not talk of himself or of his career as an inventor, he can't help talking when the conversation is turned on guns.
"I always think of a gun as something that is made primarily to shoot," he says. "The best gun is the simplest gun. When you begin loading a gun up with a lot of fancy contraptions and 'safety devices,' you are only inviting trouble. You complicate the mechanism and make that many more places for dirt and grit to clog the action.
"You can make a gun so 'safe' that it won't shoot."
Of Browning's new guns it is not, of course, permissible to give any details. One, however, is a light rapid-fire gun, weighing only 15 pounds, which can be fired from the shoulder like the ordinary rifle. Each magazine carries 20 rounds and the empty magazine can be detached and another substit