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Svelte, trim and elegant, the Auto-5 remained in continuous production until 1998, two years shy of a century.
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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.
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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.