John Moses Browning: The Mormon Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World

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Few people are aware that John Moses Browning—a tall, modest man born in 1855 and raised as a Mormon in the American West-- invented the mechanism used in virtually all modern pistols, created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World War I which dominated air and land battles in World War II. Nathan Gorenstein (author of The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World) is here to tell the story of this little-known American legend whose impact on history ranks with that of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

Photo Credit: Public Domain [Browning Brothers gun shop, Ogden, Utah Territory, 1882. L-R: Thomas Samuel Browning, George Emmett Browning, John Moses Browning, Matthew Sandefur Browning, Jonathan Edmund Browning, and Frank Rushton]