I read with some melancholy that Browning has decided to discontinue their pump-action BPS.
I always loved the look and feel of the BPS, but as with so many Brownings (of all types), I could never quite get past the “Browning premium” price.
Which, as Phil Bourjailly explains, is largely the reason why it’s been discontinued:
So, what happened to the BPS? Times changed. Semiautos were still called “jam-a-matics” in 1977, and many hunters back then preferred to shoot pumps even if they could afford a semiauto. As semiautos got better, the reliability gap between pumps and autoloaders shrank. Costs rose. The real advantage between pump and semiauto shotguns became price. The pump market adjusted. Remington responded with the Express in the 1990s, a cheaper version of the Wingmaster. Benelli introduced the very affordable Nova around 2000. Mossberg kept cranking out the same humble, durable Model 500 it has always made.
The BPS wasn’t intended to be a cheap pump, and Browning stuck by its gun for a long time. While it’s too bad the BPS was discontinued, honestly, it stayed around a little too long. In the last years of the BPS, it was readily apparent that costs had to be cut to keep the price down, and the gun no longer looked like the glossy 20-gauge that I bought so many years ago.
One wonders what would have happened had Browning followed Remington’s lead (or even preceded them) with a budget version of the BPS, but that’s really not the Browning Way, is it?
So why am I melancholic about the BPS’s demise? I hate to see ANY gun discontinued, is why.