THE BROWNING AUTO-5: A SHOTGUN, A WEDDING & OUR VERY OWN BONNIE AND CLYDE.

Welcome back to another Owen Guns Firearm Friday! This week’s article is a little bit different, because tomorrow is a pretty special day for the Owen Guns family, our very own Meggy is getting married! Now, before anyone gets too excited, we can confirm that it is not a shotgun wedding… although knowing these two, there might still be a shotgun at the wedding! So, in honour of Meggy and James tying the knot tomorrow, we thought there could hardly be a better firearm to pull from the museum than one of the most famous shotguns ever made: the legendary Browning Auto-5.

And since James and Meggy have become a bit like our very own Bonnie and Clyde, hopefully with considerably less crime, fewer police chases and a much happier ending, the Auto-5 gives us another little historical connection to the era of America’s infamous outlaw couples. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow became two of the best-known names of the Depression-era outlaw period, when repeating and self-loading firearms had already transformed the American firearms landscape.

While the Auto-5 isn't what made Bonnie and Clyde famous, Browning-designed firearms and other repeating arms were very much part of the world in which their story unfolded. For us, however, the Bonnie-and-Clyde-style partnership we are celebrating this weekend is James and Meggy, and we expect their getaway car to leave the wedding rather more peacefully.

The Browning Auto-5 itself has a much more respectable claim to fame. It was the world’s first successful semi-automatic shotgun!, and the man behind it was none other than John Moses Browning, arguably one of the most influential firearm designers who ever lived. Browning had already produced a remarkable series of successful firearm designs by the end of the nineteenth century, but the idea of creating a shotgun that could use the energy of firing to automatically eject the spent cartridge and chamber the next one was something genuinely revolutionary. Browning filed the first of several patents covering his autoloading shotgun in February 1900.

The Auto-5 operated using Browning's ingenious long-recoil system. When fired, the barrel and bolt recoiled together inside the receiver for approximately the length of the cartridge. The bolt was then held rearward while the barrel travelled forward, allowing the fired case to be ejected before the action fed the next cartridge into the chamber. It was an incredibly clever mechanical solution for its time, and the basic principle proved so effective that the Auto-5 remained in production for generations.

Perhaps the most instantly recognisable feature of the Auto-5 is its tall, squared-off receiver. Shooters came to affectionately call it the Humpback, and once you know that silhouette, an Auto-5 is very difficult to mistake for anything else.

What might initially look slightly awkward compared with the flowing lines of a traditional double-barrel shotgun was actually an enormously practical design, and that unmistakable profile would become one of the great icons of twentieth-century sporting firearms.

Interestingly, the Auto-5 almost became a Winchester. Browning had enjoyed a long and extraordinarily productive relationship with Winchester, but the two sides could not agree on the business arrangement for his new automatic shotgun. Browning then planned to show the design to Remington, but in a remarkable twist of history, Remington president Marcellus Hartley died on the very day Browning was due to meet him. Browning subsequently travelled to Belgium and reached an agreement with Fabrique Nationale (FN) in 1902.

FN would manufacture the Auto-5, beginning one of the longest and most successful chapters in sporting shotgun history. Browning was so confident in his new gun that he personally ordered 10,000 Auto-5s for the American market, and Browning's own historical account records that they sold in less than a year.

The design was also produced in America by Remington as the Model 11, after Browning negotiated US manufacturing rights with the company. The Auto-5 itself went on to appear in numerous configurations and gauges, including the famous Sweet Sixteen, introduced in 1936, along with Light 12, 20-gauge and Magnum versions. Production eventually moved from Belgium to Japan in the latter part of the 1970s, but the fundamental design remained recognisably Browning's.

That longevity is perhaps the greatest testament to John Moses Browning's genius. The Auto-5 was conceived when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, patented around the turn of the twentieth century, survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Bonnie and Clyde era, enormous advances in firearm manufacturing and the arrival of generations of newer semi-automatic shotgun designs. Yet shooters continued buying and using it. Browning finally commemorated the end of the Auto-5 with the Final Tribute edition in 1999, with only 1,000 of those high-grade guns produced. After almost a century, one of John Moses Browning's greatest creations finally came to the end of its original production life.

For collectors today, the Auto-5 represents far more than simply an old semi-automatic shotgun. It represents the point at which an idea that we now take for granted became a practical reality. Modern self-loading shotguns may be lighter, use different operating systems and benefit from more than a century of development, but they all exist in a world that the Auto-5 helped create. John Moses Browning looked at the traditional shotgun and decided that it could load itself, and then built a mechanism good enough to remain relevant for nearly 100 years.

From everyone here at Owen Guns, we would like to wish our Meggy and James an absolutely fantastic wedding tomorrow and all the very best for their future together. Our very own Bonnie and Clyde are finally making it official! There might be plenty of firearms people in attendance, there may even be a shotgun somewhere nearby (not a belt fed one), but we promise you, it definitely isn't a shotgun wedding!

Congratulations Meggy & James! - Mr & Mrs Robinson

And with that, we'll put the old Humpback back in the museum cabinet, get our good clothes ready and head off to celebrate. We'll see you next week for another Owen Guns Firearm Friday although depending on how the wedding goes, next Friday's historical artefact might just be whatever survives the reception!

And for the first time in history Owen Guns is Closed on Saturday! We Will Not Be Open 12/09/2026