The Gunsmith Who Warned America About the Winchester Model 94

The Gunsmith Who Warned America About the Winchester Model 94 video by Arms Archives.

Summary:

The stories nobody wrote down. Who handed you your first gun, what he did for a living, and why he took that one off the rack. We're putting that world on paper while there are still men who can say it right.

From 1894, the Model 94's receiver was forged from solid steel, machined, polished, and blued to match the barrel. It was a working man's rifle. It cost eighteen dollars. They finished it like that anyway.

By 1964 the receiver was pressed out of powdered metal.

It would not take the same blue.

Between 1902 and 2006, three warnings came and went about that rifle. Not one of them was said out loud. And the first one was given in a drafting room in New Haven, Connecticut — sixty-two years before anybody touched the steel.

This is the story of John Moses Browning, the Utah gunsmith who drew every rifle and every shotgun Winchester sold for nineteen years and was never once on the payroll. No salary, no title, no desk in New Haven with his name on it. He built a gun in Ogden, carried it into the plant, handed it across a desk, took the money, and went home to start the next one. Most of what he carried in was never built at all. Winchester bought it anyway and put it in a drawer, so nobody else could have it. He knew. He never asked.

In January of 1902 he stopped coming. He never explained himself — not to a newspaper, not to the trade, not once in the twenty-four years he had left. Eighteen months later Winchester put its side in writing and mailed it to every dealer in the country: the company would be perfectly able to get along without the Brownings, and would probably be better off without them.

Winchester was right. That's the part nobody tells you.

There's a way to tell which side of it your rifle was made on. Look at the serial number. Under 2,700,000 and the receiver was forged and milled. Above it and the steel changed. You can usually see it without the number — hold the receiver up next to the barrel in good light. If they're the same deep blue-black, it's the old steel. If the receiver reads gray or slightly purple against the barrel, it isn't.

Go find yours and look. Then tell me in the comments which way it went, who handed it to you, and what he did for a living.