John Browning's Final Performance: The Browning Hi Power

The Browning Hi-Power was a game-changer when introduced in the 1930s and it’s still a revered gun culture icon today– and for good reason.

Envisioned by firearms genius John Moses Browning in the early 1920s, as his most modern combat handgun, the Hi-Power was strong, simple, accurate and reliable while being easier to manufacture than many contemporary pistol designs. Single-action, like his vaunted Colt Model 1911, the improved short recoil Hi-Power used FN engineer Dieudonné Saive’s staggered magazine to produce a 13+1 round capacity in 9mm.

With the first patents on the Hi-Power applied for in 1923, Browning himself would pass away in his workshop in Belgium at age 71 in 1927– leaving Saive to finish the design. By 1935 it was ready for production and was adopted by the Belgian Army.

During World War II, the Germans took over the FN factory in Belgium in 1940 and continued producing the Hi-Power for their own use while Saive, who managed to escape to the West, would help put the gun into production by English in Canada for Allied use. As such the Hi-Power saw active front-line service on both sides of the conflict.

After the war was over and commercial production restarted, the Hi-Power was one of the most popular military handguns in the West, serving at one time or another with 68 countries, and carved out a stake of the civilian market as well. Browning-marked guns were made by FN starting in 1954 and imported to the U.S. with latter models assembled in Portugal from components made in Belgium.

By 2018, FN ceased the production of the vaunted handgun after a more than 80-year run.